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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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https://archive.org/details/dofundamentalist0Oforr 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
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OS a EEN MN Oy: 


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FEB 2/7 1926 
x 


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“OLogr Fei, a 






Do 


Fundamentalists 
Play Fair? 


/ 


Bi 
By W. M.’ Forrest 


Professor of Biblical History and Literature, University of Virginia 


NEW YORK 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1926 
All Rights Reserved 


Copyright, 1926, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and printed. 
Published February, 1926. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. 


FOREWORD 


Watching children at their games, you will fre- 
quently hear some one cry out, “‘No fair!’’ There- 
upon there may follow an argument, but when the 
point is clearly made and sustained by the group 
of players the offender must conform to the rules 
or get out of the game. It is most interesting to 
note that expulsion is seldom necessary. Children 
may often disobey or take liberties with rules im- 
posed upon them by their elders. But with their 
own rules, whose reasonableness or necessity they 
recognize, they rarely trifle. 

No Fair regulations are of three general kinds 
although they are all in the single interest of fair 
play. Some of them are inherited, established reg- 
ulations for the game being played. “They come 
along with the game, just as the unwritten law of 
its season does, and are no more to be questioned. 
No Fair hunching in marbles. No Fair hitting the 
butt of the other fellow’s egg with the point of 
yours in egg-picking.. No Fair shoving your ball 
with your mallet in croquet. 

Other rules are adopted for the particular occa- 
sion and may vary every time the game is played. 
No Fair hiding in the house when hide-and-seek 
is being played in the yard. No Fair running into 


[5] 


FOREWORD 


the neighbor’s yard when playing police-and- 
criminals. Next evening the rules may be revised 
and a wider range accorded. 

Yet other restrictions may arise from the nature 
of the case, being inherently right or wrong. No 
Fair moving or laughing if you are playing corpse 
and funeral. No Fair peeping when you are It in 
hide and seek. No Fair tripping up another runner 
in a race. No Fair biting in a fight. 

It is all very simple and very potent in child- 
world. Fine training it is for later life in grown- 
up world. And it is in the hope of getting a rec- 
ognition and application of the No Fair rules in the 
sphere of religious discussion and controversy that 
these pages are written. They are primarily for 
the benefit of those on the religious side of the 
current controversies, because the writer trains with 
that crowd. He wants religion to be victorious. 
But he knows that victory in violation of No Fair 
rules is defeat in any sphere, and particularly in 
religion. He wants religion to be in good repute 
among those who are without, as the Scripture 
says church officers should be. Some of the rules 
may be those coming down from the past, merely 
in the interest of getting somewhere in the conflict. 
Some may be only temporary rules of the game 
agreed upon. Some may be the deep-rooted prin- 
ciples of eternal right and truth. No matter; they 
should all be honestly observed, or we should get 
out of the game. 


[6] 


FOREWORD 


It is now a heated and strenuous game. Added 
to all the perennial contest between sect and sect in 
the church, and religion and irreligion in the world, 
we have the new game in the church between fun- 
damentalist and modernist, and in the world, be- 
tween religionist and scientist. Whether the game 
is new, or just an old one coming back after hav- 
ing been long in disuse, it should be played under 
the same old rules of fairness that we all observed 
in our childhood. The church, the Bible, God will 
be shamed if any smallest degree of trickery or 
meanness be allowed to enter into the contest. Fair 
play! “A fair exchange now, as the children say!’ 





1]JI Cor. vi.13, A New Translation, James Moffatt. 


[7] 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
OL as 0 Ee PR ed le AO A ee RE ALE lk il at At 5 
CHAPTER 

faeeNO PAIR ANTI-EVOLUTION: ONLY’ UL. lo eee LI 
ieee WOLPAIR’ REPUDIATING: USHER® Wo 0e au ehe tee ba? 
III. No FAIR DENOUNCING ASSUMPTIONS .......... 24 

IV. No FAIR BLAMING EVIL ATTENDING A SYSTEM ON 
ETSMADVOCATHS 0. c'ak 4 6 oR AOL ee 30 

V. No FAIR PROMOTING SECTIONALISM AND RACIAL 
HATE IN JHE NAME’ OR: GHRISH ao eee ee 38 

VI. No FAIR THE LAW IN THE RELIGION OF THE 
nb FA TI Ded) pueda i UP wee er be 2 yh Be Ne as 45 

VII. No FAIR DESERTING OUR BIBLE FOR INFALLIBLE 
ALITOGRA DHS 0 nb 8) Sinan Pee ae ian remeron gee ye 51 
SLivw NOOPAIR: VERBAIn INSPIRATION’. «br. crt celctaiscns oat 60 

IX. No FAIR RESTRICTING CHRISTIANITY TO THE 
TGNORAN TS sek can ae et eee eee TEE na a) 68 

X. No FAIR SUBSTITUTING A HEATHEN GOD FOR THE 
GHRISTIAN: GOD! <i.0) Ju Bees es Be OP Rae 76 
ied oe WV ETA TH TY -1 7 IS NO - BAIR) is ts Raul von ee ee 84 
XII. WHAT MIGHT RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY ....... 97 


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Do Fundamentalists Play Fair? 


CHAP PERV 
No FAIR ANTI-EVOLUTION ONLY 


It it clear enough to any honest interpreter of 
the Bible that its statements leave no place for the 
evolutionary theory of the origin of life. Neither 
Genesis nor the much more ancient Babylonian ac- 
count of creation from which it is copied ever 
dreamed of such a thing. Whether made before 
any other form of life whatever, as the second 
chapter of Genesis asserts, or made on the sixth 
day of the creative week after all other forms of 
life, as the first chapter declares, man was created 
instantly by the immediate fiat of God. So every 
Bible writer from Genesis to Revelation believed. 
‘There was no slightest chance of his holding any 
other view, the state of Semitic thought being what 
it was. [he Tennessee court was unquestionably 
right in holding any theory of evolution contrary 
to the Bible. Any scientific evidence, or testimony 
of any biblical expert attempting to prove the con- 
trary, had the trial judge admitted it, would have 
led to the branding of the witness as foolish or 
false. If competent to testify, such witness might 
well have been indicted for perjury. If incompe- 
tent, there was no place for his drivel in so serious 
a case. 

If, then, American states are determined to ban 


{11 ] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


any theory of the origin of life which contradicts 
the Bible, they may as well pass their laws just as 
rapidly as their several legislatures can meet. But 
it is No Fair to treat one hypothesis of a single 
science that way. [hey should ban every science 
in the same fashion, for every science is in Oppo- 
sition to the Bible. 

No Fair banning evolution without also pro- 
hibiting the whole of Biology of which that ex- 
planation of the origin of life is a part. Because 
the Bible gives so few details of the creation of life, 
a tricky harmonist or a dishonest special pleader 
might make some show of getting evolution in. 
But when that same Genesis tells us that Jacob 
did Laban out of all the best of the increase of his 
flocks by having the strongest of them breed spotted 
and streaked lambs and kids, by the simple device 
of having them look at spotted and streaked sticks 
while breeding, what becomes of the famous Men- 
delian law? ‘That law is no theory, but a fact 
proved myriads of times with plants, animals, and 
men, since its discovery and formulation by the 
pious Roman Catholic priest whose name it bears. 
Or if it be rejoined that for the very laudable pur- 
pose of enabling Jacob, the Hebrew, to profit at 
the expense of Laban, the Syrian, the Almighty sus- 
pended that law of nature and had things happen 
as Genesis relates, in spite of such No Fair rejoinder, 
Biology must nevertheless go. 

‘The law of Moses classes both hare and coney as 
ruminants whereas they are classed by the biologist 
as rodents. Jesus declared the mustard seed to be 


{12} 


NO FAIR ANTI-EVOLUTION ONLY 


the smallest of all seeds, although various smaller 
seeds are known. If scientists are permitted to 
contradict Moses and Christ on matters of plain 
fact within the range of any ordinary man’s ob- 
servation, we may as well have done with laws 
against hypotheses about which most American 
legislators and jurors never dreamed before July, 
1925. 

No Fair banishing evolution from the schools 
without casting out Geology with it. The testi- 
mony of the rocks is against a world made in six 
days. Even if they could be shown to mean not 
days but geologic periods of almost infinite length, 
that would help little. No one dreamed of re- 
garding them as other than days of twenty-four 
hours each until cowardly scientists and theologians 
needed to do so to avoid a conflict with facts, for 
seven of them made a Jewish week whose last day 
was the Sabbath. But, anyway, Geology knows 
nothing of any such sharply defined periods with 
no overlapping. Quite as little does it know of 
such an order of appearance for the successive stages 
of life as Genesis gives in its first chapter, to say 
nothing of the much more preposterous order of 
the next chapter. Nor can any geologist find a 
place within historic time for such a world-embrac- 
ing flood as Noah’s. No respect for the statements 
of Genesis may be expected among pupils who are 
taught the elements of Geology. 

No Fair banishing evolution from the schools 
and leaving Astronomy to queen it there. The 
nature of the biblical universe is clear and simple. 


{13 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


The earth was made as a flat body whose four 
corners were supported by pillars going down 
through the waters that were around it and under 
it. Then a canopy or firmament overarched it, 
with waters pent above it for rain and floods. 
Four days after this, all vegetable life having mean- 
while appeared, various lights were placed in the 
firmament, the sun to rule the day, the moon and 
stars to rule the night. ‘Thereafter the lights re- 
volved around the earth, or appeared below the 
firmament when in use, and were at other times 
behind the scenes, above the firmament, ready for 
their next entrance. “They were all very beautiful, 
but quite insignificant compared with the great flat 
earth which extended equal distances in every di- 
rection from Jerusalem which was at the center. 
‘The firmament was only a little way up, and might 
have been reached from the top of the tower of 
Babel if Jehovah had not prevented the completion 
of that ambitious building. To stop the move- 
ments of sun and moon across the firmament was 
as simple as for a man to stop moving a lamp. 
The Almighty did it when Joshua at the battle of 
Bethhoron needed a long day to complete the 
slaughter of the people whose country he had in- 
vaded with the avowed purpose of killing every 
man, woman, and child in it, so that his tribes 
could settle there. It was equally easy to open the 
windows of heaven and let the waters above the 
firmament pour down and drown all the inhab- 
itants of the earth except Noah’s family. 

‘To teach Astronomy in the face of all this is the 


{14} 


NO FAIR ANTI-EVOLUTION ONLY 


height of folly if the science of Scripture is to be 
reverenced. Ihe sun is the center of our system 
and existed for millions of years before our earth 
was whirled from it into space where it has ever 
since revolved. ‘The earth is a round ball which 
moves around the sun. “The “‘firmament’’ is limit- 
less space where every star is a sun and every sun 
the center of a vast system of worlds, all thousands 
of millions of miles removed. ‘Io stop the sun to 
help out Joshua would be impossible, as it does not 
move with reference to the earth; to stop the earth 
would destroy it and probably dislocate the whole 
solar system. Flat earth with its four pillars, Sheol 
down under it as the abode of departed spirits, 
solid firmament, windows of heaven, waters above 
the sky, little lights moved about there for our 
convenience—Astronomy lays its sacreligious hands 
upon them and they wither and pass away. Were 
not churchmen in the days of Galileo right in 
silencing his infidel jabber? What do the defenders 
of the faith mean by allowing such antiscriptural 
rubbish to be taught our youth to-day? Has the 
mantle of faithful, honest Bre’r John Jasper fallen 
upon no fearless prophet to-day who will proclaim 
the biblical truth that the sun do move? 

But time and space alike would fail to show the 
full measure of the iniquity of all the other sciences. 
Philology contradicts the story of the confusion of 
tongues at Babel, and proves the biblical etymolo- 
gies childish derivations based upon sound. Psy- 
chology takes man’s intellect out of his reins or 
kidneys and puts it in his brains and his compas- 


{ 15} 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


» sion out of his bowels. Medicine depends no longer 
upon Jeremiah’s balm in Gilead nor James’ an- 
ointing oil, nor the Good Samaritan’s wine and oil 
poured into open wounds. One and all the sciences 
have contradicted God’s word, have pried into 
secrets and mysteries of his, have dared to do 
things which he alone had power to do in Bible 
times, and have_thereby robbed the Bible of the 
place it once held as the infallible guide to all 
knowledge. And now, to have defenders of the 
faith let them all go on unchallenged except poor 
little evolution—No Fair! 


[16 } 


CHAPTER II 
No FAIR REPUDIATING USHER 


James Usher, who was born in 1581 and died 
in 1656, was one of the greatest scholars of his 
age. He was an Episcopal clergyman, and for 
years he rendered distinguished service to his church 
in his native Ireland, rising from priest to bishop, 
and archbishop. We are not concerned with his 
career or writings except to remark that the one 
was notable, the other voluminous. It was during 
the years 1650 to 1654 that he published his mas- 
terpiece, a work on the biblical chronology that 
has immortalized him. Written in Latin, as 
learned works were wont to be, it bore the title— 
Annales Veteris et Nout Testamenti. Upon it he 
lavished an amount of painstaking labor such as is 
rare among ecclesiastics, though necessary and com- 
monplace among scientists. It soon became an ac- 
cepted authority for biblical dates. “Those dates 
have long been a part of the English Bible, being 
printed in the marginal columns bearing references 
in all the regular editions of the King James Ver- 
sion. ‘These dates seem first to have been printed 
there in 1701 in a fine edition that the learned 
William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, and then of 
Worcester, brought out at the instigation of Arch- 
bishop Tenison and the request of Convocation. 


[17] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


The edition was in three large folio volumes, 
printed in London “‘by Charles Bill and the Exe- 
cutrix of Thomas Newcomb deceased.” 

Usher’s dates were long ago abandoned by bib- 
lical critics who reconstructed the Old Testament 
by processes of the Higher Criticism and thereby 
got themselves soundly berated by all the orthodox. 
To this day it is counted a shameful thing among 
the lovers of soundness that scholars should prefer 
the chronologies of heathen Babylonians, Assyrians, 
and Egyptians to the inspired chronology of the 
Hebrews, albeit the biblical chronology is selfcon- 
tradictory and otherwise in confusion. But there 
is no element of unfairness in the abandonment 
of Usher by modern scholarship, because the rules 
of the game they play expressly provide for that 
course. 

The case is otherwise with the defenders of the 
Bible against science and other modern heresies. 
They proceed upon the assumption that the biblical 
data respecting the time of Old Testament events 
are precisely as stated in their Bibles. From cre- 
ation to Noah’s flood is a definite period of years. 
You have but to add together the ages of the suc- 
cessive patriarchs to get that period. Add to that 
one week, or, strictly, six days, which had elapsed 
from the creation of the universe to the creation 
of Adam, and you have the precise length of time 
from creation to flood. Working down from Noah 
to Abraham, to Moses, to David, and so on to 
Christ, you can tell to a nicety the dates of flood 
and creation in years before Christ. Now that is 


{ 18 ] 


NO FAIR REPUDIATING USHER 


exactly what Archbishop Usher did, bringing to 
bear upon his task the erudition arid patience of 
which he was master. 

There is but one honest way of escape from 
Usher’s dates for the man who takes the Bible, 
just as it is written, as his final authority. Even 
that is not open to the defender of the English 
Bible. For others, appeal might be made from the 
Hebrew text from which our Bible was translated 
to the old Samaritan Bible of the fifth century B. 
C., or the old Greek Bible of the second century 
B. C. Taking the data furnished in those three 
ancient Bibles in the fifth and eleventh chapters of 
Genesis there is found a wide divergence. From 
creation to flood in the Hebrew is 1656 years; in 
the Samaritan, 1307; in the Greek, 2242. From 
the flood to Abraham in the Hebrew is 290 years; 
in the Samaritan, 940; in the Greek, 1170. When 
it comes to taking the Bible just as it is written, 
or, for those who claim to do so, to taunting scien- 
tists and ancient historians for lack of agreements 
as to remote dates, we have here a plain case of 
No Fair. For the pot to call the kettle black is 
not unto edification, and hence is no Christian ex- 
ercise. What is written on this subject in those 
three ancient versions of the same Bible cannot be 
made to agree. Nor without the patient applica- 
tion of the modern biblical criticism which every 
one hundred percent. orthodox person despises, 
there is no way to tell which of the three most 
probably represents the original reading. There 
is no Hebrew text in existence earlier than the 


[ 19} 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


tenth Christian century, whereas the Samaritan was 
derived from the Hebrew in the fifth, and the 
Greek in the second century before our era. If 
you get your date from the few surviving Samari- 
tans, it is one thing. If you get it from the mil- 
lions of Greek Catholics, it is another thing. If 
you get it from the Jews, or the Roman Catholics, 
or the Protestants, whose Bibles follow the Hebrew 
text, you get a third thing. “The one hundred per- 
center cannot decide, but must blindly follow 
whichever Bible he happens to live under. The 
modern scholar knows the Hebrew text probably 
represents what was originally written in the Bible, 
but he also knows that whichever of the three 
chronologies you back because it is in your Bible, 
you will certainly be supporting what can by no 
possibility be true. | 
Archbishop Usher followed the data of the He- 
brew, and if he were alive to-day he would have 
to do the same if he wanted to state what the best 
text of the Bible says on the subject. He thus 
found that the creation of the universe according 
to Genesis was in the year 4004 B. C. and that 
the flood came in 2349 B. C. Being an honest 
man with no ugly facts of modern Geology to 
tempt him to be otherwise, he let the Bible tell 
its own story, and it said that all the time from 
the beginning of the whole created universe to the 
day when Cain was born, after Adam and Eve were 
driven out of Eden, was one year. You have but 
to look at the Genesis dates in any reference Bible 
of the King James Version and you will see at the 


{ 20 } 


NO FAIR REPUDIATING USHER 


head of chapter one, “Before Christ 4004,’ and 
at the head of chapter four, “Before Christ 4003.” 
And you have but to put out of your mind all the 
antibiblical notions you have allowed modern 
science to foist upon you, and read your Bible with 
honesty and intelligence to see that Usher was 
right. In the same fashion, you can see that the 
infallible record of Genesis tells that in 2349 B. C., 
as Usher has accurately figured out the inspired 
data, all previous civilization was totally destroyed 
from the whole surface of the earth. A year later 
all life and history began anew from the germs of 
it saved in Noah’s ark. 

When confronted by the facts of Astronomy 
testifying that the beginning of the universe must 
have been inconceivable eons and ages ago, do you 
answer that any statement to the contrary drawn 
from the Bible is based upon Ushers uninspired 
figures? When faced by the record of the rocks 
demonstrating that the very modern part of the 
universe known as the earth must have been hurled 
off the sun untold millions of years ago, do you 
say that Usher and not the inspired writer of 
Genesis is responsible for any conflicting view? 
When Biology tells of the long path of life from 
simple cell to man, and Anthropology adds the 
ages from the first man up to any such man as 
Adam, do you blame the one day from animal to 
man, and the four days from primitive vegetation 
to highest animal, on Usher? When history, 
plainly written in human speech and read by the 
scholars of the world, reveals several ancient civil- 


{ 21 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


izations antedating the time of the flood by thou- 
sands of years do you lay the flood date of 2349 
B. C. at the door of Usher? 

No Fair! For shame! Usher is the Bible, and 
the Bible is Usher so far as those dates are con- 
cerned. And if you desert both, under the attacks 
of those who accept neither, and flee to the few 
added hundreds of years of the Greek Bible it will 
profit you nothing. ‘Those extra years are of no 
account in the face of a discrepancy so vast. ‘The 
Greek Jews probably juggled their figures to try to 
make the Bible plausible to their heathen neighbors, 
as you are now trying to jockey yours into accord 
with your scientific neighbors. If your contention 
is false, forsake it; if it is true, defend it. But in 
the name of common honesty don’t try to keep 
the credit for taking the Bible absolutely as it is 
written, and also gain the advantage of holding 
with modern knowledge. Don’t profess to believe 
the data from which honest old Archbishop Usher 
got his chronology and then throw him to the 
wolves when his figures are challenged. And don’t 
espouse the Restoration hoax of many theologians 
who are yet to learn what fair play is. “They 
profess to be able to save the face of Genesis and 
Usher and themselves by claiming that a gap of 
eons and ages yawns between the first and second 
verses of the Bible; that all the records of ancient 
life found in the rocks were buried there after 
verse one; that all from verse two on is the story 
of a reconstruction of the earth’s surface and a 
re-creation of life after some geologic cataclysm 


[ 22 } 


NO FAIR REPUDIATING USHER 


had buried the life of the vast ages before. An 
honest ignoramus is much more admirable than 
an intellectual coward. Ignorance may have both 
honesty and piety; harmonistic cowardice can have 
neither. Choose between Genesis and Usher on 
the one side, and science and history on the other. 
You cannot have both, and Genesis without Usher 


is No Fair. 


{ 23 J 


CHAPTER III 
No FAIR DENOUNCING ASSUMPTIONS 


Orthodox religion has always loudly protested 
against the guesses, theories, and unproved assump- 
tions of scientists and philosophers. Refusing to 
examine patiently the evidence which has satisfied 
science that evolution is a fact, its recent opponents 
have swept it all aside as a guess. But even if it 
were granted that organic evolution is an unproved 
hypothesis, religion has no right to object to it on 
that score. Nor is it fair, under the rules of the 
game that religion has elected to play, to object to 
any theological or philosophical theories that are 
the outcome of a cross between science and religion. 

The creation and the flood stories are manifestly 
products of just such theories of scientific men try- 
ing to express in religious phraseology their specu- 
lations about observed natural phenomena. ‘The 
whole of the early chapters of Genesis and other 
portions of the Bible are the conclusions of science- 
theologians of ancient times. Where did the phe- 
nomenal universe come from? In what order did 
life appear? What was the origin of a sense of sin? 
Why do men wear clothes? Wherefore the pangs 
of childbirth? How explain the toil of man in a 
world so prolific in thorns and thistles, so niggardly 
in food plants? Whence arose the ancient strife be- 


{ 24] 


DENOUNCING ASSUMPTIONS 


tween the roving herdsman and the settled tiller of 
the soil? How account for the diverse and divisive 
languages of humanity? 

You can readily see the phenomena which 
prompted those questions in primitive society. “The 
men who studied the facts and reached conclusions 
from them were proto-scientists. “Those who 
brought the results of their research and speculation 
into relation with religion were science-theologians. 
The best of such conclusions among Semitic think- 
ers were preserved in such stories as are in our Bible. 
Hence the lover of the Bible should be the last man 
in the world to decry the observations of science, 
the speculations arising therefrom, and their expres- 
sion in religious parlance. Nor should he condemn 
the metaphysical religio-scientist because his spec- 
ulations prove to be wrong. MHe has but to face 
the actual statements made in Scripture by the early 
forerunners of such men to see that they were al- 
ways wrong. He has but to answer the questions 
given above in the exact words of Holy Writ to 
demonstrate that every single answer flies in the face 
of all modern knowledge. How utterly unfair, 
therefore, to deny modern observers the very priv- 
ilege that, of old, produced the Book that is being 
defended. 

The Bible writers also made use of the phil- 
osophical theories of their time in the service of. 
religion. “The single case of the use of the famous 
logos theory of Greek speculation will prove the 
point. ‘There it stands, written large, in the very 
forefront of the most revered of all the Gospels. 


[ 25} 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


Where did the writer get it? and what use did he 
make of it? Certainly not from any other writer 
of Scripture was it obtained. Just as surely it orig- 
inated in the metaphysics of ancient theorists con- 
cerning God and his universe. NHerakleitus, Zeno, 
Plato, Philo-Judaeus, and John are the links in the 
chain, the last two having brought the Stoic doc- 
trine into relation with Jewish and Christian theol- 
ogy. And the use made of it in the Gospel was 
boldly to identify the logos of philosophy with the 
Messiah of theology, and claim that both were Jesus 
of Nazareth. Nobody ever proved the existence of 
the Greek logos, or of the late Jewish logos, or of 
the early Christian Jogos. It was one of the as- 
sumptions of philosophy pressed into the service of 
religion. After this in the very Bible itself, to say 
nothing of all the Greek speculation in the sacred 
Nicene and Athanasian creeds of the church, it is 
rather late for orthodoxy to shout down modern 
users of unproved theories in religious thinking. 

Whom then are we to condemn? Spinoza, for 
assuming that matter is self-existent, eternal, un- 
creatable, indestructible, merely because all that is 
unproved theory? Do we prove the Hebrew as- 
sumption of the creation of the universe out of 
nothing? Have we demonstrated that matter can 
be called into existence or destroyed by God? 

It is complained that scientists were not present 
at creation, did not witness the origins of life or of 
species. But who did? Certainly not any theo- 
logian, however ancient he or his views may be. 
Schools of evolutionists may say that living matter 


{26 } 


DENOUNCING ASSUMPTIONS 


appeared upon the earth from other planets, or 
stars, or arose spontaneously from inorganic matter. 
‘They may claim that it began by assembling the 
essential elements of life—-oxygen, hydrogen, nitro- 
gen, carbon—which were drawn together by a new 
form of attraction in a state of suspension when 
the earth offered favorable conditions of heat and 
twilight, and that the primitive organisms thus aris- 
ing carried with them special ferments insuring the 
development of higher organisms. Call it theory 
and point out that it may be godless, but do not 
damn it on the ground of its being unproved as- 
sumption. Religion, like science and philosophy, 
has to begin with tremendous assumptions. 

If your theory of the origin of the Bible tells you 
the Genesis account of the creation of the universe 
out of nothing, and of life and its orders by direct 
interposition of God is true, can you not see that 
you are as much in the grip of hypothesis as is the 
materialistic or atheistic evolutionist? You have 
started with the unprovable assumption that God 
told someone exactly how he made the universe, 
and that person wrote it down from God's dicta- 
tion, and that it has been transmitted to us in Gen- 
esis. You may believe it, but you can no more 
prove it than the scientist can prove how he got the 
original cell of life. If it is incredible to you that 
the universe has existed from all eternity, or at some 
point in time spontaneously sprang into existence, 
do not believe it. But humbly remember that 
when you reject a godless universe you have not 
escaped the iron grip of assumption. You have fled 


{ 27] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


from an eternally self-existent universe to an eter- 
nally self-existent God, and the only bridge making 
such a flight possible has been an unproved and un- 
provable theory. The only difference is that the 
scientist may have constructed his hypothesis him- 
self, while you have accepted yours ready-made 


from your religious teachers, as they, in turn, have 


accepted it from theirs for generations and genera- 
tions. Why not play fair with our opponents? 

Nor is it otherwise with the end of life than with 
its beginning. Some assume that death ends all; 
others, that it is the portal to immortality. As yet 
those who claim to have demonstrated contact with 
departed spirits are unconvincing. Scripture has 
its promises, but we cannot verify them. “The New 
Testament has its claims that one, at least, of the 
innumerable throng shepherded by death returned 
to the land of the living. But the very assump- 
tions of faith respecting his origin and nature for- 
bid the acceptance of his case as a norm for hu- 
manity. That aside, the story of it is in ancient 
records whose truthfulness and accurate transmis- 
sion must be assumed, not proved. Ai fine, hearten- 
ing assumption, that of immortal life, but an as- 
sumption nevertheless. Claim the edge on your 
opponent who assumes that death ends all. By all 
means try to get him to take your glorious assump- 
tion instead of his gloomy one. But do not seek 
to discredit him by foul play, as though he guessed 
and you proved. 

The fool who said in his heart, ‘““There is no 
God,’’ may have been guessing wrong. When you 


{ 28 } 


————————————— lhl CO 


DENOUNCING ASSUMPTIONS 


try to think where God came from, or how so mar- 
velous a First Cause was caused, or Creator was 
created, or how from eternity he existed with- 
out father or mother, or beginning of days or end 
of life, you appreciate that those who are not fools 
can do no more than guess right. The venture of 
faith is a noble venture, and the assumptions sup- 
porting it are pillars of character and upholders of 
courage. [hey are old and tried and dependable. 
But they are assumptions, and we are little likely 
to commend them to a faithless generation by main- 
taining that nothing but indisputable fact under- 
lies our religion. Attack their assumptions and 
sweep them away with better, but do not assail their 
right to assume. 


{ 29 } 


CHAPTER IV 


No FAIR BLAMING EVERY EvIL ATTENDING A 
SYSTEM ON ITS ADVOCATES 


It is one of the fundamental principles of Logic 
that all the accompaniments and consequences of 
a theory or practice cannot be charged against it 
with justice. Often harm arises that is more than 
offset by the good. Commonly evil ensues that is 
due to abuse. Frequently attendant ills would be 
present under any and every theory or practice. 
Because something undesirable follows something 
else is no proof of causal connection. If a course 
is followed, or a view advocated by persons obnox- 
ious to us, that is no evidence of the viciousness of 
the course or the view. A teacher is not to be 
blamed for false conclusions reached by his pupils 
if his premises were true. A leader is not respon- 
sible for acts of his followers disconnected with his 
leadership. 

We do not refuse to think because many think 
evil. We continue to breathe, eat, and drink al- 
though the most depraved men do the same. Med- 
icines are being made though murderers and suicides 
will use some of them as poisons. Fires are con- 
stantly built despite the destructive power of fire. 
Electricity is generated notwithstanding many are 
slain by it. Automobiles are manufactured by the 


{30} 


a a ee) 


BLAMING A SYSTEM’S EVIL 


million even though they bankrupt many, fill the 
land with disagreeable noise, aid robbers and thugs, 
serve as places of assignation and Iust, and maim 
and slay tens of thousands of people. But we are 
aware we must share the activities and supports of 
life with others or perish. We must risk foolish 
and wicked uses of commodities and forces, or lose 
all the benefits derived therefrom. We recognize 
that it would be irrational and unfair to blame ills 
rising from abuse, evils that would exist under any 
available conditions, and harm counterbalanced by 
greater good, on the productive and progressive 
people of the world. Ill-balanced and disgruntled 

people do so, but we know it to be unfair, and we 
“want to play fair. 

Except in religion! “Take the case of Darwin. 
By devoting his life to science he ceased to attend 
to the rites of religion or exercise his mind upon 
spiritual themes. “That was a great loss to Darwin, 
as was his loss of power to enjoy music and poetry, 
which he lamented late in life. However he did a 
prodigious amount of useful work for humanity, 
quite apart from formulating certain theories for 
which he is caluminated by religious people who 
are generally ignorant of them. He studied soil 
and crops; taught the value of earthworms in soil 
production; demonstrated that clover depends on 
cats—no cats, many field mice, few slugs of wild 
bees—hence few bees, poor cross fertilization of 
clover bloom and little clover seed. Multitudes of 
prosperous Americans without whose moneymak- 
ing colleges, learned societies, and churches would 


{31 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


languish, have atrophied their spiritual powers de- 
stroying their competitors, monopolizing the goods 
and opportunities of others, and grubbing for gold. 
Why not devote a little more energy to rebuking 
them and a little less to trying to damn the mem- 
ory of Darwin? If he paid too high a price for 
serving science is it fair to try to blast him for what 
all must do who give themselves to great causes? 
Take evolution, which is far older, and far 
younger, and far greater than Darwin. With more 
or less accuracy, he and others pointed out phases 
of the struggle for existence, and the survival of 
the fittest. No evolutionist created the struggle in 
nature, and no observer, however casual or relig- 
ious, has been able to overlook it. It might be 
concluded from current outcry that believers in ev- 
olution made all nature red in tooth and claw, and 
wickedly conspired to cause the animals with the 
strongest teeth and the sharpest claws to possess the 
earth. Yet the evolutionist does not claim to have 
created life, he only observes it. If a materialist or 
mechanist, he may say it all came about of itself. 
If a theist, he will say that God created it, just as 
surely, though far less quickly, and much more 
wonderfully, than the Bible says. And when life 
became human, despite the age-old and yet con- 
tinuing brutal strife of man, what evolutionist 
claims that brutality either does or should survive 
as the fittest human type? Every high quality of 
mind and soul enters into the conflict. “Io the be- 
liever in God, whether he be wisest evolutionist, or 
most ignorant fundamentalist, there is. the convic- 


{32} 


BLAMING A SYSTEM’S EVIL 


tion that all the spiritual forces of the universe fight 
on the side of the spiritual qualities of man. If we 
believe the fittest to survive is the godlike, why not 
thank the evolutionist for demonstrating that the 
law of nature is the survival of the fittest? Is it 
fair to condemn him for adding the testimony of 
nature to the assurance of your Bible? 

But there are Nietzsche, and Prussian militarism, 
and the World War. Are they not all linked up 
with belief that the strongest nation has a right to 
conquer the weak? Did it not all come from 
evolution and the survival of the fittest? 

Certainly not, although it is rare to find an anti- 
evolutionist talking or writing without making the 
assertion. It is easy enough to demonstrate that 
the Prussians made use of the doctrine of the sur- 
vival of the fittest to prove that only strong states 
have a right to exist, and that it is their duty to 
banish weak states from the earth. But they used 
industry and invention and schools and churches 
to the same end. And they were militaristic in 
1870 when they beat France to her knees, and 
through all the dealings that made Prussia supreme 
among the German states, and Germany supreme in 
central Europe. Also before that Austria and Rus- 
sia and Turkey had been militaristic. Nor had 
France and England and Italy awaited the an- 
nouncement of modern evolutionary theories to 
carry on many a bitter and cruel war. 

Would to God that the belief that might makes 
right, and that the earth belongs to the robber na- 
tions that can grab it and hold it, were no deeper 


{33} 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


rooted than modern science or any theories arising 
therefrom. If Darwin started it with his specula- 
tions in the latter part of the nineteenth century it 
would be easy to overtake it and eradicate it. But 
from the Cave Man up to the dawn of history, and 
from then through Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyr- 
ian, Persian, Greek, and Roman annals there is one 
unbroken record of man’s inhumanity to man. 
That is but a single strand of the mighty cable bind- 
ing humanity te its bloodstained past. Nor has 
the modern record been less bloody. All that can 
be said is that the half century during which Dar- 
winism has been somewhat widely known has been 
marked by a softening of the brutality of war and 
a hopeful and ever growing effort to put an end 
to it. 

If it is fair to lay the World War at the door of 
modern evolution because it occurred after its rise 
and after German philosophers appealed to it in 
justification of aggression, what is to be said of the 
responsibility of the Bible and the church for past 
wars? Were not many of the longest and cruelest 
wars of the past nineteen centuries religious wars? 
Were they not frequently led by so-called princes 
of the church? Or when not directly fought by the 
church, were not the armies filled with Christians 
and blessed by the church? If Darwin is to be ac- 
cursed because some of his followers have used his 
teaching to justify greed and lust and rapine in war, 
what can be said of the church of Christ? Even 
when not swept on by violence in the passionate 
hate of national strife, what is to be said for the 


[ 34} 


Se 


BLAMING A SYSTEM’S EVIL 


church in its work of persecuting to the death its 
own adherents, both Catholic and Protestant? 
How long ago was it that priests of rival Christian 
churches fell to braining one another with their 
holy vessels on a peaceful Easter morn at the 
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and 
had to be quelled by the troops of the Moham- 
medan ‘Turk? 

As for the Bible, when a good bishop of the 
Goths in the fourth century was making a trans- 
lation of it for his converts he dared not translate 
the books of Kings because they were filled with 
war and the Goths were already too warlike. It 
must have been with much fear and trembling that 
he gave them Joshua and much more of the Old 
Testament. What German frightfulness for a mo- 
ment dared to dream of such savagery as Joshua 
sets forth in the name of God? Even after well- 
nigh a millenium of progress yawned between 
Joshua and Ezekiel, it may be read in the ninth 
chapter of the latter’s book that God commanded 
men to go through Jerusalem and smite without 
mercy or pity, killing old men, young men, chil- 
dren, and women. ‘There it stands written in the 
book whose every word is declared by the orthodox 
to be the actual command of God. ‘They have al- 
ways left the door wide open to such horrible war- 
fare by insisting that it was just and right to de- 
stroy Canaanites and other sinners in such fashion. 
The babes and children were potentially, if not 
actually, guilty of all the iniquities calling for the 
slaughter of their mothers and fathers. Besides 


[35] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


they all richly merited just such a fate by having 
participated in the sin of Adam in Eden. What 
can justice demand of a righteous God but the mur- 
der of totally depraved babies? 

Does Germany or any other nation where the 
Bible is regularly read in homes, schools, and 
churches really need the recondite teachings of a 
Nietzsche to justify war and frightfulness? Can 
any legitimate inferences from evolution remotely 
approximate the explicit commands of the Old 
Testament in barbarity? What have evolution’s 
teachers ever done but point out the record of strife 
in nature? ‘They have commanded no one, in 
God’s name, to imitate it or strive to perpetuate it. 
They have recognized all the higher and nobler 
qualities of man as the finest fruit of evolution, and 
have taught that all human advancement, and even 
much in the lower ranks of life, should go forward 
under the behests of those noblest powers. 

If, then, any nation has perverted the doctrines 
of evolution to justify conquest, it has added that 
to its other sins against truth. If the record of red 
raven in the book of nature teaches man that early 
advances in the upward march of life were through 
blood and pain, the Bible teaches the same of faith 
and religion. If science must cry aloud over its 
antecedents and consequents, “I have sinned,’’ re- 
ligion and the church can do no otherwise. If the 
world is yet filled with most unholy evils, com- 
mon sense teaches us they were here ages before 
church, Bible, and Christianity arrived, and cannot 
lawfully be laid at the door of religion. And com- 


[36 ] 


a. i ——- 


BLAMING A SYSTEM'S EVIL 


mon fairness decrees that science is no more respon- 
sible for modern iniquity than religion is. Both 
science and religion have come a long way, but 
they must travel much farther before they can be 
free from the errors, and half truths, and the con- 
sequences of both, that so sadly curse all human 
institutions and systems, 


[37] 


CHAPTER V 


No FAIR PROMOTING SECTIONALISM AND RACIAL 
HATE IN THE NAME OF CHRIST 


For years before the World War conservative re- 
ligious forces in the United States were organizing 
to resists, by concerted and ably financed efforts, 
the progress of biblical research and scientific inves- 
tigation. By putting these under the headings of 
Higher Criticism and Materialistic Science the op- 
position was being justified; but inasmuch as prac- 
tically all biblical scholarship and all science not 
subordinated to conservative Bible views were an- 
tagonized, it is correct to say that the forces were 
being marshalled against biblical research and sci- 
entific investigation. Ministers of the Gospel can 
recall how many books on The Fundamentals were 
sent broadcast to all preachers absolutely free. “he 
twelve volumes thus sent out ran to about 3,000,- 
000 copies and all of the many individual papers 
making up every volume were written by prom- 
inent men who, if yet alive, are now known as 
fundamentalists. The series started in 1909, so 
that it is evident from that single activity of a big 
movement that the war delayed and interrupted 
the program of fundamentalism, rather than created 
it. Quite likely the violence and bitterness of the 
recent propaganda are due, partly, to the moral and 


{ 38 } 


SECTIONALISM AND RACIAL HATE 


spiritual bankruptcy following in the wake of such 
a world catastrophe. But the movement antedates 
the war, and its battle against modern learning was 
not caused, but only delayed by the war. 

During the war not a few of the leaders of the 
earlier and later phases of the movement were paci- 
fists. “hey had every right to be such if their con- 
sciences so prompted, and the disillusionment of 
such religious people as the writer over the outcome 
of a war supported in the hope that it would end 
all war forbids regarding the term pacifist as an 
opprobious epithet. Some of them, then, including 
the late chief protagonist of fundamentalism, were 
against the war with Germany, and labored hard 
to prove that Germany was no more to blame than 
any other nation, and was guilty of nothing in 
prosecuting the war that justified our wrath against 
her. It is easy to recall that their efforts to keep 
the peace with Germany at any price led to the 
pacifists in many pulpits being denounced as pro- 
German. ‘The acts that roused America to fury 
were denied, or softened, or justified in an effort to 
allay the demand for war. 

This bit of history has been recalled for the pur- 
pose of noting a contrast. Attention has already 
been directed to the fact that fundamentalists pro- 
fess to believe that evolution as taught in Germany 
caused the war. Obviously the purpose is to take 
advantage of the war-begotten hatred of Germany 
to discredit evolution as taught in America. Of a 
piece with that unfairness is the effort to array that 
hate against all scientific and biblical scholarship 


139] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


which will not bow the knee to the great gods of 
fundamentalism. We now constantly hear and 
read of the poison gas of German radicalism, of the 
frightfulness of German rationalism. All results of 
the higher criticism of Scripture are branded, ‘‘Made 
in Germany.’ Hymns of Hate and the subserv- 
iency of the German pulpit to the war lords are 
solemnly charged to*the account of modern science 
and its ability to deaden the conscience. Germany 
and all its people are declared to have fallen in the 
original sin of the nation in departing from the 
Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible. 
All nations and peoples are solemnly warned that 
they shall all likewise perish if they do not re- 
nounce Germany and all her materialistic science, 
and all her biblical criticism, and flee for refuge into 
the fundamentalist ark. 

The folly of such an unchristian course should 
be apparent to everyone. If Germany has taught 
us, or if we have stolen from her, secrets of coal- 
tar dyeing and other arts, do we refuse to use them? 
If she has potash and other useful minerals, do we 
decline to avail ourselves of them? If her man- 
ufactures are needed by the world, shall they not 
be bought? Because Gluck, Bach, Beethoven, 
Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner came out of Ger- 
many are we to shut our ears to all the ravishing 
harmonies their souls have uttered? Martin Lu- 
ther, and therefore the good and bad of Protestant- 
ism, are German. Are we to cast them into outer 
darkness? 

Unchristian it necessarily is to promote or per- 


140} 


SECTIONALISM AND RACIAL HATE 


petuate national hatreds by appeals to religious 
prejudices. The Bible has never been narrowly 
national since Christianity took hold of it. The 
church is supposed to be universal. Christ cer- 
tainly was not made in America. Bible, church, 
and Christ cannot be served or saved by national 
suspicion. All three owe much to Germany and 
doubtless will yet owe much more. The radicalism 
and rationalism in Luther that the church of his 
day so bitterly cursed now stand among the choicest 
treasures of America. Wagner’s revolutionary in- 
novations in music are now established and con- 
servative things. Neither all of science nor all of 
biblical criticism arose in Germany. Such a part 
of them as did originate there makes us debtor to 
Germany. Accept or reject nothing because of its 
origin. Prove all things, hold fast that which is 
good. No falsity is less false because promoted by 
American fundamentalists; no truth less true be- 
cause first proclaimed by German liberals. 

Probably no one will question that current fun- 
damentalism and anti-evolution have their chief 
stronghold in the southern states. “The West is said 
to foster much of the same thing, but not to 
the same degree, not with whole denominations 
throughout state after state unitedly and unvary- 
ingly fundamentalist. But whatever the facts that 
a careful religious census might bring to light, the 
South certainly loudly proclaims itself as the lead- 
ing, if not the only, orthodox region in Christ- 
endom. 

Its homogeneity is easily explained. Slavery kept 


141} 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


foreigners out in the old days, negro labor has 
largely done so since. Defeat drove it in upon it- 
self and left it hostile to influences originating else- 
where. Arrested development in many respects 
inevitably resulted, particularly in so conservative a 
field as religion. “his was the more pronounced 
because the three denominations enrolling the vast 
majority of southern people broke away from the 
corresponding northern churches in ante-bellum 
days, and have ever since maintained their isolation. 
They are also the denominations most conspic- 
uously fundamentalist throughout the nation. 
Again a bit of history connected with the bitter 
hatreds of a war has been recalled to make clear one 
of the evils of the current religious controversy. 
Southern fundamentalism is now sedulously stir- 
ring up ancient sectionalism in the interests of a 
rigid orthodoxy. Nothing is commoner than to 
hear the assertion that all other regions are honey- 
combed with liberalism. In the South alone is the 
Simon-pure orthodoxy to be found in all its pris- 
tine perfection. Elsewhere Yankee perversity, and 
German rationalism, and Irish Catholicism, and 
New England Unitarianism, and Oriental Panthe- 
ism have formed unholy blends which the vast. 
wealth of North and West has decided to put in the 
place of Bible religion. “The South has been kept 
free from this, in the providence of God, that it 
may now save the church. Sermons, convention 
speeches, newspaper correspondence, tracts, pam- 
phlets, and books maintain all this. Lads from 
church colleges and seminaries repeat it. Thus a 


[42 ] 


SECTIONALISM AND RACIAL HATE 


great region, large enough to be a powerful nation, 
that once nearly succeeded in becoming such, is now 
glorying in its shame—the shame of sectionalism, 
backwardness, ignorance, smugness, and self-right- 
eousness. 

As though it was not unholy enough to join to- 
gether two such pitiful things as sectionalism and 
religious prejudice in the name of Christ, a further 
evil is being wrought. In the nature of the case, 
denominations that divided on questions growing 
out of slavery and states’ rights should long ago 
have united again. More than half a century after 
the strife ended, should churches be the only ele- 
ment refusing to be reconciled? should Christian- 
ity be the only unforgiving factor? Division was 
no necessity of the situation originally, as is pro- 
claimed by the fact that two denominations did not 
split, and have worked in harmony ever since. 
One was the Episcopal Church, aristocratic and 
episcopal in government; the other the Disciples, 
democratic and congregational in government. 
What ought never to have been, but came to be in 
times that tried men’s souls, is now being perpet- 
uated by appeals to race prejudice, sectionalism, and 
fundamentalism. A publication is at hand wherein 
a leading bishop seeks to arouse resistance to the 
proposal to unite the northern and southern divi- 
sions of his church by stressing the claim that 
southern purity of faith will be tainted and de- 
stroyed if it merges with its northern counterpart. 
And another bishop has been quoted as opposing 


[ 43] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


union from fear of negro bishops being imposed 
upon the South by the North. 

The writer's father served the South throughout 
its struggle, although he had to come from a border 
state beyond the Confederate lines to do so. He 
confesses to a full share of southern convictions 
and prejudices on the race question and other mat- 
ters. He has deep sympathy with the old Confed- 
erate chaplain who is said to have begun his 
prayers, “‘O God, the God of Robert E. Lee, Stone- 
wall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.’’ “Those heroes 
were in every way much more worthy to be as- 
sociated with God than were Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob who are so frequently mentioned in prayer. 
But truth is truth, and religion is religion, and 
neither should be prostituted to base uses. And 
sectionalism, racial antipathy, and self-righteous- 
ness have no fellowship with Christ. If he could 
disregard the wall between Jew and Samaritan in 
his day, if Paul could proclaim that in Christ all 
distinctions of race, nation, sex, social position, cul- 
ture, and language had been abolished, the cause is 
a bad one that strengthens itself today by setting 
against one another German and American, north- 
erner and southerner, black and white. “There must 
be fairer ways of settling all pending questions 
between religious conservatives and liberals. 


I 44} 


CHAP TERiViI 


No FAIR THE LAW IN THE RELIGION OF THE 
SPIRIT 


Christianity is properly a religion of the spirit. 
It does not need, and should not use any external 
authority or force to propagate itself or resist its 
‘rivals. As heir to the best that Judaism produced 
it claims to realize the ideal of Jeremiah, that of a 
religion neither having nor needing law because all 
its adherents are regulated by inner principles. De- 
riving directly from Christ, inwardness and spir- 
itual guidance displace the commands of any law 
however venerable and revered. Commended by 
Paul, it is free from the law and under faith and 
grace. 

But it early began to barter its birthright for a 
mess of pottage in the shape of aid from external 
forms, restraints, and prohibitions. While Christ 
laid down no laws, but taught only principles, and 
Paul, at his best, declared that to the extent that a 
man did anything because coerced by law he ceased 
to be Christian, the latter fell back upon law for 
the regulation of the very imperfect Christians of 
his day. Then, with the coming of a Christian 
emperor in the fourth century, the church began 
an age-long bondage to the state with its laws and 
force. It seemed so restful after having endured 


{ 45] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 





three centuries of buffeting by Roman power. It 
seemed so swift after the slow processes of persua- 
sion and conversion. It seemed so effective after 
the many troubles with heresy. 

From then till now Christianity has been in bon- 
dage. State churches are under the dominion of 
secular power. Legalistic and militaristic methods 
and means remain dominant in churches even when 
in no formal union with the state. Even in Amer- 
ica where such unchurchly men as Jefferson estab- 
lished the freedom of the state from the church, 
neither state nor church has been free. Crude ef- 
forts to force religion upon others by fine, impris- 
onment, and torture, such as were resorted to in 
colonial days, were outlawed. But American codes 
abound in Sabbath laws, and the like, that are the 
voice of the church commanding people what to 
do, and using the power of the state to make them 
do it. Laws exist, and others are pending, to com- 
pel the reading of the Bible every day to all the 
pupils of the public schools. At the command of 
the church, states are banning scientific teaching 
believed to be injurious to the church. Sometimes 
it is done by enactment of the legislature. Oftener 
it is done by rule of the state boards of education, 
usually headed by the governor of the state. 

While professing to preserve neutrality and give 
no unfair advantage to irreligion, such actions are 
manifestly designed to support the particular re- 
ligious views of those prompting them. It is un- 
thinkable that the bigotry trying to destroy relig- 
ious schools by compelling all children to go to the 


[ 46 } 





public schools has any regard for any beliefs but 
its own. Imagine a minority of Mohammedans in 
any state where fundamentalist laws are made get- 
ting something prohibited from the schools because 
it is in Opposition to the Koran. Picture a group 
of Christian Scientists, in any American state where 
they are hopelessly outvoted, trying to get the leg- 
islature to forbid the teaching of modern medicine 
because it discredits Mrs. Eddy’s Key to Scripture, 
and the Bible as they understand it. Yet the Chris- 
tian Scientists of any state which taxes all the 
people to support medical schools and hospitals 
have as much right to have it all stopped as a group 
of fundamentalists have to stop the teaching of 
evolution. They can claim that if the truth 
about the sin of thinking yourself sick, and the 
folly of relying upon doctors instead of God is not 
to be taught at public expense, the least to be asked 
is that the state shall not teach the reality of disease 
and the value of doctors. Palpably, both what the 
state prohibits, and what it commands, the church 
is dictating. 

The bondage of religion to law goes much fur- 
ther than that. “he church has only very slowly 
won a very small minority of men to the accep- 
tance of Christ’s ideals by implanting right prin- 
ciples within them. Discouraged and impatient 
because of long deferred hopes, it turns from true 
morality to legal morality. What Catholics did in 
forcing conquered nations to enter the church, 
what the Protestants did in compelling natives of 
the East Indies to embrace Christianity, is only a 


[ 47 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


kind of material picture of what is going on now. 
Getting people to love temperance and sobriety 
proved too slow. ‘Therefore the church went into 
politics, manned an organization with preachers di- 
verted from the work of preaching the gospel, and 
enacted a law to prohibit drinking. “Thereupon it 
began to discover that even the armed might of the 
United States cannot make the nation love sober- 
ness, nor keep men from getting drunk until they 
do love soberness. Now it is working valiantly to 
preach the love of temperance because it is the law, 
whereas it is a much more Christian procedure to 
preach temperance because it is right, law or no 
law. 

Similarly with the evils of divorce, the church 
is turning more and more to law. Long ago it in- 
terpreted the teaching of Christ on divorce as a law, 
although it is only a principle and an illustration. 
Then it laid down various laws of its own in dif- 
ferent denominations. Now it is clamoring for 
state and national laws. “The trouble, however, is 
within men and women where no law can reach. 
Unless their hearts be changed to love one another 
and set the good of their children above lust and 
wanton caprice, their homes will be hell, their phys- 
ical union a blasphemy against marriage. “The task 
of the church is not to try to perpetuate such homes 
and unions by law. It is to bring to bear the con- 
straining love of Christ in their lives. Where that 
rules, ideal marriage is possible with no law what- 
ever save for the purpose of record and inheritance. 

The trouble in all these matters, here educed 


{ 48 


LAW IN RELIGION OF SPIRIT 


merely as illustrations of a principle, is that relig- 
ious people lose sight of the reality chasing shad-~- 
ows. Uniform divorce laws are all right, but they 
cannot touch the heart of the evil. Prohibition 
laws are a necessity to protect society from the 
liquor business and its outrages. But the church 
loses all moral and spiritual perspective when it tries 
to gain its ends by law instead of by persuasion. 
The laws fail until the great majority are brought 
to the place where they need no law. And it is at 
least a fair question for Christians to consider 
whether Christ was not wiser than they in attend- 
ing to the persuasion, and letting the laws attend 
to themselves. 

Where might Christianity now be if it had ad- 
hered to the inwardness and spiritual control of 
Christ? What might the church now be if it had 
not taken refuge under the shadow of Constantine, 
and had never put its confidence in an arm of flesh? 
‘To what heights of temperance and chastity might 
nineteen centuries of Christianity have raised hu- 
manity if all the energies devoted to driving them, 
and coercing them, and prohibiting them, and curs- 
ing them had been passionately poured out in win- 
ning them to Christ? 

As for laws forcing people to respect church and 
Bible, they insult our religion. The church of the 
glorified Christ? the Word of the living God? and 
yet we must appeal to wrangling legislatures of 
petty politicians to protect them! “Through all his 
life Jesus never invoked any law against any man. 
He violated the laws of his day and of ours at 


1 49 } 


a 


(eS FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


times. He challenged men to enforce the law 
against an outcast woman if they dared. He suf- 
fered shame and death under Jewish law and Ro- 
man law. But he stopped no question, or argu- 
ment, or attack by any law, human or divine. Nor 
has God, so far as heard from up to the time of 
this writing, found it necessary to compel any man 
by law and force to believe anything. 

Choose law, or choose the spirit. You cannot 
have both. If you elect to rely upon law for your 
own and the world’s salvation you are no longer 
under grace. Legal morality, religion by power 
and might, and not by the Spirit, have been the 
bane of the church. False brethren, privily spying 
upon others and invoking the law as the bulwark 
of salvation, are to-day as surely laboring to impose 
a yoke of bondage and destroy the liberty we have 
in Christ as were the legalists of Paul’s day. No 
Fair claiming the freedom of a religion of the spirit 
while relying upon the law to compel righteousness 
or prevent opposition. 


[ 50 } 


CHAPTER VII 


No FAIR DESERTING OUR BIBLE FOR INFALLIBLE 
AUTOGRAPHS 


When American legislatures pass laws against 
criticizing or discrediting the Bible they mean the 
common, or King James Version of the Bible. 
Many English speaking people are unaware of the 
existence of any other. If aware, everything ever 
taught them of biblical infallibility has led them 
to the natural conclusion that our current Bible is 
a perfect copy of the original, inerrant Bible in He- 
brew and Greek. Ministers continue to preach on 
texts that were left out of the Revised Version 
thirty-five years ago as no part of the Word of 
God, even when tested by the exceedingly conserva- 
tive textual criticism of that day. ‘The very latest 
fundamentalist journals are now quoting passages 
of Scripture as mistranslated in the classical version, 
when the correct rendering of the Revised would 
disprove the very point in question. 

The first line of defense of biblical infallibility 
is thus seen to be the common English Bible. The 
people are taught that every word in it is inspired. 
It is the volume usually thumped by the preacher 
when he declares he believes every word in it just 
as it is written. He siezes that very book and 
shakes it in the face of his congregation when he 


{ 51] 


DESERTING BIBLE FOR AUTOGRAPHS 


defies scientists or others to point out one single 
error in it, from cover to cover. But when not in 
the pulpit where it would be irreverent for anyone 
to answer them, or in the denominational press 
where it is seldom possible to answer them, such de- 
fenders of inerrancy soon abandon their first line 
trenches. Bad grammar, erroneous translations, 
occasional verses that even the most hardened con- 
servative cannot longer deny to be late interpola- 
tions, are easily shown to any English reader who 
can be induced to look at any modern edition. 
Yesterday learned books were written to prove that 
the clearest trinitarian text in the New Testament 
was written there by the Holy Spirit, and anyone 
questioning it was shouted down as a Unitarian. 
Today it is admitted that Erasmus in 1527 put in 
I John v.7 with its reference to the three heavenly 
witnesses, the Father, the Word, and the Holy 
Ghost, because he lost a bet, and had not the cour- 
age to stand by his scholarship. Yesterday relig- 
ious fanaticism was denouncing the Revised Ver- 
sion and its departures from the Received Text as 
worse for faith in the Bible than all the assaults 
of infidels. “To-day they have given up that battle 
and are denouncing other things with as little rea- 
son or effect. 

‘The second line of defense of an infallible Bible 
is the Hebrew Old Testament, and the Greek New 
Testament. “They lie back of our English Bibles in 
the languages wherein the Holy Spirit originally 
inspired men. Difficulties of mistranslation are eas- 
ily disposed of thus; passages not belonging to the 


{ 52] 


DESERTING BIBLE FOR AUTOGRAPHS 


Bible are not in critical original texts. They are 
not as handy to thump and shake and quote as our 
English Bible. “hey cannot be relied upon to con- 
vince plain people who have been carefully taught 
to suspect critical scholarship. But in a pinch, the 
Scriptures in the original may be resorted to when 
contending with enemies of a faultless Bible. 

However, the position can be rendered untenable 
in a serious battle. On an appeal to the Greek New 
‘Testament it is discovered that its manuscripts differ 
so radically that they have to be grouped in four 
well-marked families. Which family will you 
adopt as giving the correct text? ‘True to its his- 
tory of always taking the wrong position, to the 
damage of faith, and never leaving it until driven 
out by scholarship, conservatives took the wrong 
family. The Received Text was carelessly derived 
from a few faulty manuscripts of the latest and 
worst of the four groups of Greek ‘Testaments. 
But any one taken has its faults. If you decide to 
take them all as representing the total testimony as 
to inspired Scripture you will find that they con- 
tain from 150,000 to 200,000 different readings. 
That is, they will average six different answers to 
every verse in the New Testament when you ask 
them just what are the infallible words of God. 
Rather bad for fundamentalism, even though most 
of the divergencies are of slight consequence to 
scholars. 

Matters are less mixed in the Hebrew manu- 
scripts, though really less satisfactory to scholarship. 
There is one type of text, hence practically no vari- 


{53 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


ous readings. Yet Textual Criticism, that is the 
Lower, not the devil-begotten Higher Criticism, 
points out many errors of transmission, both inten- 
tional and inadvertent corruptions. Worse far than 
all such errors, however, are the things lying clear 
beyond the reach of Textual Criticism as solid parts 
of the Bible in the original and all of the transla- 
tions. Divergences and contradictions are of that 
sort in parallel accounts of the same events. “They 
lie in both Testaments, sometimes in one book, 
sometimes in two, or five or six. Even when 
merely circumstantial variations with substantial 
agreement they are fatal to infallibility which must 
have absolute inerrancy. “The case is hopeless when, 
for example, the first and second chapters of Gen- 
esis are honestly compared, the mixed facts and 
figures of the flood story are collated, or when the 
years from the death of Solomon to the revolution 
of Jehu are given in terms of the kings of both Ju- 
dah and Israel, and differ by three years. 

Worse even than this to a defender of a Bible all 
equally the absolute Word of God and of the same 
value in all its parts, are the ignorance of elemen- 
tary facts of science, the contradictions of contem- 
porary history, the savage and immoral laws, and 
the primitive religious conceptions. All of which 
fundamentalism denies, or harmonizes, or charges 
to miraculous intervention, or divine wisdom be- 
yond human comprehension. But when strongly 
assaulted by solid learning which cannot be con- 
fused or intimidated as simple believers may, de- 
fense of the Bible in the original tongues is aban- 


[ 54 } 


DESERTING BIBLE FOR AUTOGRAPHS 


doned as defense of the English Bible was earlier. 

The third line of defense of a perfectly errorless 
Bible is the original autograph manuscripts as they 
left the hands of their inspired writers. They were 
in Greek, but they were three centuries older than 
our most ancient existing manuscripts. “hey were 
in Hebrew, but written by the hand of Moses, or 
David or the prophets, from twelve to twenty-five 
centuries before our oldest Hebrew manuscripts 
were copied. Upon that line of battle fundamen- 
talism elects to make its last stand. Not to the 
masses of trusting Christians who are easily fooled 
and satisfied by declaring their English Bible to be 
infallible; not to the rank and file of inquiring 
students and clergy who are sufficiently impressed 
by citations from the Hebrew and Greek; but for 
the determined and remorseless scholars who admit 
the impregnability of no position that assault can 
demolish, conservatism digs itself in on the infal- 
lible autographs. 

There the matter ends in smoke and mist. No 
one can attack a non-existent fortification. The 
autographs are nowhere; no man living can prove 
what was in them, and no man dead has left us any 
record of what they were like when he read them. 
The people who condemn philosophy for its as- 
sumptions, assume that the original autographs 
were absolutely in accord with eternal truth, to the 
last jot and tittle. The foes of evolution, because 
they call it a guess, guess that infinite perfection 
dwelt in the lost autographs from alpha to omega. 
To question what they say, to deny anything so 


[ 55] 


~ DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 





self-evident as the proposition that our Bible orig- 
inally existed in complete and flawless accord with 
all truth, is to proclaim oneself hopelessly lost in 
hardness of heart and contumacy of mind. What 
could be more fair? 

To admit the need of perfect autographs is to 
surrender the whole claim of infallibility. All we 
have is our existing Bible. If it needed to be in- 
errant, why did God allow it to become errant after 
having gone to the trouble of getting it all mirac- 
ulously written out without error? If our salva- 
tion depends upon implicit obedience to an infal- 
lible revelation, what does God mean by letting the 
record get corrupt? In vain all the miracles of 
creation and redemption, in vain the providential 
dealings with Israel, in vain the life and death of 
Christ. We are without the perfect autograph rec- 
ord of all this, and must therefore perish. It will 
not do to answer that what we have is sufficient to 
make us wise unto salvation even in its faulty state. 
If that is so, why not leave the hypothetical auto- 
graphs out of it altogether? 

In sober honesty there is no probability that the 
autographs would excel what we have. ‘Textual 
criticism assures us that, despite all the changes 
from the original, we now have substantially what 
was originally in the Bible. Literary and historical 
criticism traces the documents back to their prob- 
able dates, and indicates when and how the exist- 
ing books were made. There is a faithful reflection 
of the progress of ethical and spiritual ideals from 
age to age. Where there is discrepancy, or con- 


[ 56} 


DESERTING BIBLE FOR AUTOGRAPHS 


flict, or ignorance, or imperfection, it is what 
would be anticipated from the writers, in the nature 
of the case. “There is no more ground for guessing 
at a flawless original Bible than for assuming a per- 
fect original world. Fundamentalism does both, 
having the whole creation marred in Aadm’s fall, 
and the Bible corrupted in transmission. 

Among all the amazements of fundamentalist 
inconsistencies there is nothing more astounding 
than their commitment to a Bible upon a dead level 
of perfection. They claim to be the only true 
followers of Christ left on earth. Yet the New 
Testament position, especially in Hebrews, is that 
the Old Testament was faulty, partial, and, like 
other old and worn things, ready to vanish away. 
That one can be a Christian in the New Testa- 
ment sense, and yet regard the Old Testament as 
of permanent and final authority is impossible. 
Christ used it as we ought to use it, as a wonderful 
record of God’s dealings with Israel. He is con- 
stantly cited by conservatives as proving all sorts 
of things about the Jewish Bible—the authorship 
of the Pentateuch, the integrity of the Book of 
Isaiah, and the historicity of Jonah and Daniel. 
Such questions have nothing to do with religion, 
so he had no reason to think of them, any more 
than he had to settle the order and process of cre- 
ation, or the relative size of all the seeds in the 
world. He reflected the ideas of his hearers and 
his age. 

But when it came to spiritual concerns, note his 
attitude. Was all the old Bible equally good from 


[57] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


cover to cover? Not if we may judge of it by the 
books and passages he quoted for his own soul's 
needs. Was it all equally binding upon men? Not 
if we estimate it from his attitude toward all its 
vast priestly and ceremonial element. Was it all 
the perfect Word of God that could not be broken 
and would never pass away? Not if he said of one 
Mosaic law that it was due entirely to men’s hard- 
heartedness in dealing with their wives, and contra- 
vened a fundamental, divine law of marriage. Not 
if he set his requirements as to lust and hate and 
murder over against the Law of Moses. Did he 
pass approving judgments upon its moral and spir- 
itual standards? Not if he rebuked his apostles 
for wanting to call down fire from heaven as Eli- 
jah did upon his opposers. Not if he put forgiv- 
ing love in the place of the primitive brutality of 
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Not if 
he replaced the indescribable hate and curses of the 
vindictive Psalms with his principle of rendering . 
blessing for curses and praying for despiteful use. 
Manifestly Christ knew nothing of a Bible per- 
fect in all its parts. Beyond reasonable question, 
he laid upon his followers the obligation of reject- 
ing everything in Scripture that was out of har- 
mony with reason and conscience. It cannot be 
unchristian for men to follow the example of 
Christ, feeding their souls upon the meat of the 
Bible while rejecting the husks. The straightfor- 
ward thing to do is to make spiritual use of the 
Bible as it is, and not try to reverse Christ and 


{ 58] 


“DESERTING BIBLE FOR AUTOGRAPHS 
shame the church by claiming plenary infallibility 


either for the book that exists, or for the auto- 
graphs that have perished. 


i 59 } 


CHAPTER VIII 
No FAIR VERBAL INSPIRATION 


Inspiration and infallibility as applied to the 
Bible are used synonomously in popular speech. 
Every word of Scripture is considered infallible be- 
cause it is believed that every word is inspired. 
Inspiration is the process whereby the divine omnis- 
cience saw to it that men wrote every word in 
the Bible as errorless in every detail as though the 
all-wise God had himself penned it. We have al- 
ready seen that some concessions may be made as 
to our existing Bibles, but for all practical pur- 
poses a Bible is a Bible, and it is the product of no 
man’s mind, but of God's. 

As carried on, fundamentalist controversy has 


no point whatever unless the Bible is wholly God's, 


and, in no particular, man’s. If Hebrew men, 
however great and wise, had anything to do with 
the creation story, no fundamentalist would expect 
it to give any reliable information. It would then 
be granted that only the unscientific notions of a 
distant age, and not the scientific knowledge of 
modern times, could be reflected in it. “The story 
is accepted and defended, not because it is a fine 
piece of literature, not because it follows a logical 
and reasonable order, not because it can be twisted 
into a sort of harmony with accepted astronomical 


{ 60 } 


Sees ae ee a 


NO FAIR VERBAL INSPIRATION . 


and geological facts. It might violate every one 
of these particulars—as indeed the story in the 
second chapter does violate them all save the first 
—and be defended as the truth none the less. It 
is accepted as absolute truth because it is in the Bible, 
and the Bible is regarded as coming directly from 
the all-knowing God who could not possibly make 
a mistake in telling exactly how he created the uni- 
verse. 

As to just how God brought about the writings 
of this literature free from any taint of human half 
truth or error, there may be some difference among 
fundamentalists. But that is held as immaterial, 
the result is what counts. It might have been as 
mechanical as when a mother holds a pencil in an 
infant’s hand and writes to the absent father. Or 
perhaps it was as when a man dictates to his sten- 
ograher; or the utterances of a subject under control 
of a hypnotist. Anyway, what is insisted upon 
by fundamentalism is a record as absolutely perfect 
as though God used one or all those processes in 
recording his revelation. Whether so stated or not, 
it means literal, verbal inspiration. 

When asked to accept every word of the Bible 
as the end of all controversy on any subject it 
touches—scientific, historical, linguistic, moral, and 
religious—the world has a right to inquire when 
such a theory of inspiration arose, and what evi- 
dences support it. As to the when, it is safe to 
assert that in its present form and implications it 
is a product of the Protestant Reformation, and, as 
such, cannot go back of the sixteenth century. 


[61 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 





Prior to that time the Bible was not the sole author-: 


ity and final court of appeal for the church. The 
voice of the church itself, as the living vehicle for 


conveying God’s will to men, was the final author- 


ity. Cut adrift from such external control in a 
world unfitted for self-control, Protestantism 
sought a substitute and found it in the Bible to 
which it had already ‘appealed as against the voice 
of Rome. Hence it proclaimed the Bible, and the 
Bible alone, as its rule of faith and practice. Its. 
early confessions of faith set forth in detail its be- 
lief that every word, and even the very pointings: 


of the words of the original, were inspired. 


How little that was the unbroken tradition of 
the church is clear enough. “To support its conten-. 
tion that the Bible is no sufficient rule of faith and 
practice, the Catholics laid hold on everything that 
would tend to undermine the authority of Scrip- 
ture alone. The Hebrew Old Testament had been: 
for centuries in the hands of infidels, the Jews. The 
Greek New Testament had for centuries been in 
the hands of schismatics, the Greek Catholics. Why 
appeal to such as against the sacred Latin Bible as 


interpreted by holy church? When it was dis- 
covered that the Old Testament was written and 
for centuries preserved in Hebrew shorthand with- 
out any vowel letters, the Protestants resisted the 
discovery and wanted it suppressed because of its 
damaging effect on verbal inspiration. But the 
Catholics eagerly welcomed and proclaimed it. 
When the Samaritan Pentateuch was brought to 
the knowledge of Christendom its many variations 


[ 62 } 


a 


NO FAIR VERBAL INSPIRATION 


from the Hebrew, whose oldest manuscripts were 
fifteen centuries younger than the original Samaritan 
Bible, led the Catholics to use it to discredit the 
Protestant Bible and theory of inspiration. 

For a theory so late, why attempt to claim uni- 
versal reverence? True, the Protestant church 
repudiates its parentage, but it is not possible to 
start anew sixteen centuries after the origin of an 
organization, and both blot out those centuries 
and at the same time claim the support of antiquity. 
It is easy enough to prove that the ancient church, 
and the New Testament regarded the Scriptures as 
inspired, but that is a very different matter from the 
Protestant theory of verbal inspiration. Funda- 
mentalists are flying in the face of history, and 
playing fast and loose with the meaning of words 
when they claim their notion of the Bible is accord- 
ing to the ancient faith of the church. It is a late 
invention from which revolts in the Protestant 
ranks began early and will continue until the theory 
yields to truth. 

Looking for the evidences in support of such a 
theory we find none. Our consideration of infal- 
libility revealed the fact that the original manu- 
scripts containing the very words of God disap- 
peared centuries ago. We are ruined and undone 
if our salvation and our knowledge depend upon 
the very words God dictated. Nor in such copies 
of the sacred book as have come down to us do we 
find verbal agreement. Lay the New Testament 
quotations from the Old side by side with their 
original, and you will see verbal: differences, not in- 


{ 63 ] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


frequently changing the meaning of the passages. 
They are loosely quoted, evidently from memory, 
and not very good memory as to either sound or 
sense. Or take such allusions to Old Testament 
events as that of Jesus to Jonah. ‘The original ac- 
count says a great fish swallowed Jonah; Jesus says 
he was in the belly of a whale. If one is right 
the other is wrong. ‘The words differ, to the con- 
fusion of verbal inspiration, and the statements are 
irreconcilable. If it was a whale, it was not a fish. 
‘The matter is inconsequential upon any reasonable 
view of the Bible. Upon the fundamentalist view 
that the Bible is the absolute statement of God, free 
from any error, the matter becomes a stone of 
stumbling and a rock of offense. If God does not 
know the difference between a fish and a whale 
it is senseless to maintain a book he wrote will be 
free from scientific error. If he knew better but 
accommodated his language to popular conceptions, 
then we can say the same for Genesis and let the 
scientist tell us what God really meant. Either 
way, verbal inspiration is ruined. 
Turning to the reports of Christ’s sayings in the 
four Gospels, to a comparison of the accounts of 
the resurrection, or Luke’s account in Acts of the 
council Paul reports in Galatians, you again wreck 
the theory. Verbal agreements were nothing to 
these writers. Contradictions and difficulties bristle 
everywhere that parallel accounts appear. Facts 
differ and words differ, and therefore meanings 
differ. It almost looks as though the divine pur- 
pose in these duplications abounding in the Old 


{ 64 } 


NO FAIR VERBAL INSPIRATION 


and New Testaments were to put the reader upon 
notice not to look for verbal agreements or infalli- 
ble statements in the Bible. What wonder, then, 
that upon laying the Bible down beside the revela- 
tion of God in his world we find further contra- 
dictions! 

Upon the assumption of Christianity in LR 
the Bible is a lone book without another of its 
class in the world. It claims, here and there, that 
it is inspired, or that God told men what they have 
recorded in it. “To learn what is meant by such 
claims we should study its pages to find out just 
what an inspired book is like. It is futile to make 
up our minds what an inspired book should be 
like, and then turn to the Bible to see whether it 
has such characteristics. “That is what theologians 
do with God—decide what his attributes should be, 
and then proclaim that God is a being with those at- 
tributes. As no one ever meets God and examines 
him as to the presence or absence of such character- 
istics, the theologian cannot be checked up. But 
when it is asserted that the Bible is inspired because 
of its possession of certain qualities, we do meet the 
Bible, and can check up. We have seen how the 
theory splits upon the rocks of all sorts of facts, 

The hypothesis of the fundamentalist is that 
God is perfect, and, therefore, a book inspired— 
that is, made by the Lord himself——will also be 
perfect. Even without opening the Bible to see 
what it says of itself, it should have been apparent 
that such a hypothesis would likely prove to be 
false. God made the world, yet its imperfections 


{ 65 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


constitute one of the most serious obstacles to faith 
in an all-wise, beneficient God. The Bible says 
David was a man after God's own heart. It might 
reasonably be inferred that such a man would be 
like the perfect God. But he was actually such a 
man, in spite of many admirable qualities, as would 
certainly end in prison or on the gallows in any 
civilized state in the world to-day. “The church 
and the family are regarded as divine institutions 
upon scriptural authority. Nevertheless their his- 
tory has been a record of the worst and the best of 
which humanity is capable. : 

If it be rejoined that God made all the things 
perfect, and saw that they were very good, but the 
Devil entered into and spoiled them, that helps 
nothing. If we have or know all these as imperfect 
why may not the Bible also be imperfect, despite 
its divine origin? If the Devil spoiled the warld, 
and David, and the church, and the family, why 
may he not have spoiled the Bible, too? If God 
could not, or did not see fit to keep the Devil out of 
the church, how can it be known that he kept him 
out of the church’s Bible? In point of fact, when 
the orthodox flee to the original autographs as the 
only infallible Bible, do they not confess that the 
Devil spoiled the existing, imperfect Bible? 

Fit the theory to the facts. Let the Bible tell 
exactly what it is like by comparing Scripture with 
Scripture, and all with the world, and every solid 
conclusion of reason. It will be found imperfect 
when tested by our best standards, like all other 
divine things. But like other good things given us 


[ 66 } 


NO FAIR VERBAL INSPIRATION 


of God, it will be found to serve our needs and 
lead us to God. All Scripture is God inspired, and 
is serviceable for training in righteousness. But it 
is of no use in teaching science. “The notion that 
it is inspired unto perfection in all earthly knowl- 
edge is not what it says of itself, and not what the 
church universal has ever believed. It is foul play 
for any sect or party to teach falsehood about the 
Bible, and demand that all Christians accept it. 


[67 J 


CHAPTER IX 


No FAIR RESTRICTING CHRISTIANITY 
TO THE IGNORANT 


At the outset Christianity won its adherents 
largely from the masses. Jesus and all his apostles 
were of the common people. Even after the move- 
ment began to spread abroad, and had as its chief 
missionary a man of specialized training, it re- 
mained true that not many wise were called. Like 
all other movements requiring radical social and 
spiritual readjustments and sacrifices, it was impos- 
sible for it to claim the well-placed and self-satisfied. 
Only in the rarest cases will a man of settled con- 
victions and assured position, like Saul of Tarsus, 
count everything but loss for the sake of any new 
religion. 

But in the long run a religion is doomed that 
cannot command the support of brains. It may 
convert only a few intellectuals, but their powers of 
leadership will grow from the best elements of the 
masses of converts a larger number. In the early 
centuries, and later in missionary work among civil- 
ized peoples, it has always proved true that Chris- 
tians have had far above their proportion of the 
educated classes. Nevertheless it must always re- 
main true that the masses of Christians, like all 
other masses, must remain relatively ignorant. As 


{ 68 } 


_ =. eS ee 


RESTRICTING CHRISTIANITY 


compared with the first generation of Christians 
they may be well educated. But by the side of the 
highly educated of their own or of other societies, 
they must be as babes in intelligence. 

It is sheer arrogance of learning to attempt to put 
Christian doctrine beyond the comprehension of 
the masses. All the accompaniments of teaching 
and accessories of Christian life must be within the 
reach and capacity of the plain people. Sunday 
school pictures and music are not to be banned be- 
cause they violate all canons of art. Church serv- 
ices and preaching are not to be scorned because 
aesthetically and intellectually they cause pain to 
the refined and cultured. Simplicity, even crudity, 
with the rational element in the background and 
the emotional element in the forefront, must be the 
order in any popular movement. Even to keep the 
Bible in the noble English of the Elizabethan period 
is undoubtedly to violate the simplicity of the gos- 
pel. To hear and read the word of God in the cur- 
rent speech of the mother tongue of their own day 
is the right of the people. 

Having said thus much, it must, however, im- 
mediately be added that to forbid conveying Chris- 
tian truth and life to the cultured intellectuals in 
speech and forms congenial to them is the arrogance 
of ignorance. ‘That attitude in the early centuries 
would have doomed Christianity to defeat as a 
world religion. Without Paul, Irenaeus, Tertul- 
lian, Augustine, and Origen, the Galilean fishermen 
and their successors would have made sorry busi- 
ness of converting the Roman Empire. By the 


{ 69 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? _ 


fourth and following centuries the effort to tell 
what Christ and Paul meant in terms congenial to 
Greek and Latin philosophy brought forth the his- 
toric creeds. In the sixteenth century a new world 
situation required a restatement of faith in the Re- 
formation confessions. None of that was de- 
manded by the masses. Except as it was later 
adapted to their understanding in simple speech 
and picture wording, it did violence to their hon- 
esty to require them to declare they believed it. 
But without it, pobably nether they nor their in- 
tellectual superiors would have remained Christian 
at all. 

The present fundamentalist attitude is essentially 
a refusal to allow modern scholarship to do for this 
generation what was done for earlier generations. 
It is an effort to make Christianity and ignorance 
synonymous terms. Not that every fundamentalist 
is ignorant, but many of them are. A survey of 
American Christianity would undoubtedly show 
that fundamentalism is strongest in the denomina- 
tions where standards of education for admission to 
the ministry are lowest. In other denominations its 
chief advocates are generally the ministers entering 
service irregularly from business or professional life. 
Or they are men debarred by age or environment 
from keeping in touch with modern culture. “Their 
great training camps are not colleges nor theologi- 
cal seminaries. Years ago they gave up all hope of 
universities, but clung to the fond hope that in 
church colleges young men might be kept ig- 
norant enough to qualify for the ministry. Still 


{ 70 } 


RESTRICTING CHRISTIANITY 


later they thought theological seminaries might send 
out blind leaders of the blind if they could be kept 
under intimidation. But that plan failed because 
young men sufficiently educated to enter a respec- 
table seminary were too far advanced in education 
to care to be preachers of ignorance. Now they 
are herded from the common schools into Bible 
Institutes where zeal takes the place of study, and 
such knowledge of any subject as their untrained 
minds meet is so sterilized as to leave ignorance un- 
disturbed. 

‘The leaders of fundamentalism not thus far ac- 
counted for may be very learned men. Being few 
in number among the apostles of ignorance they 
are the more conspicuous. Whatever their erudi- 
tion, they elect to keep their Christianity insulated 
from all else they know. ‘Their ignorance is wil- 
ful. Even as modern medicine makes serums by 
killing organisms and injecting them into the blood 
so that living organisms of the same kind will be 
slain when entering the same blood, so these men 
slay ideas before admitting them to their minds, 
and thus inoculate themselves against the admission 
of modern thought. ‘The existence of knowledge 
is not unknown to them. ‘They can speak of it 
and quote its words. But they will not to assimi- 
late it. Only as a serum to inoculate themselves 
and others against the admission of living ideas 
have they any use for present day thought. 

It is all as though Jerusalem had succeeded in 
proving Paul not a Christian because he put his 
gospel into more advanced thought. Oras if Rome 


{ 71 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


had succeeded in putting beyond the circle of 
Christianity all the reformers. “The present con- 
flict is only the struggle between conservatism and 
progressivism. For its ancient prophets funda- 
mentalism is ready to erect monuments. But the 
living prophets must be cast out and stoned. Yet 
by such methods Christianity itself would long ago 
have been slain. Only insofar as it remains alive 
to adapt itself anew to its environment in every 
age can it succeed. What it has been may be beau- 
tiful enough, but a living being is more valuable 
than the most gorgeous mummy ever exhumed from 
the tombs of Egypt. 

John had a right to commend Christianity to his 
ae by using the old heathen ideas about the logos. 
Paul had a right to cast the gospel into the legalistic 
phraseology made familiar everywhere by the 
government and courts of Rome. The Nicene 
Fathers had a right to try to express in Greek 
thought the relations between Father, Son and 
Spirit. [he church had a right to take the pagan 
festivals of the winter and spring solstices and turn 
them into Christmas and Easter. Modern Chris- 
tians have the right to put the religion of to-day 
into the phraseology of current philosophy and 
science. 

What does liberalism propose so alien to Chris- 
tianity even as now held by fundamentalism, as the 
logos doctrine was to Jewish Messianic thought? 
Can any modernist do more violence to our religion 
than the legalistic terminology of Paul did to the 
free spiritual religion of Jesus? Is any present 


{ 72 } 


oe 


RESTRICTING CHRISTIANITY 


summary of faith in a jargon so incomprehensible 
to simple Christians as the Nicene Creed was when 
made, and has increasingly become with passing 
centuries? Will ever the church be called upon 
to absorb again and transform into Christian purity 
such wild pagan error and filth as inhered in the 
festivals of Christmas and Easter? 

To defend all that ancient adaptation as against 
modern developments is folly. Nothing in it was 
essential or permanent. Forcing it upon men now 
because it was once useful or valid is ignorance, 
no matter how learnedly urged. Ancient good can- 
not but become uncouth. We now need our own 
adaptations in our own terminology. If they prove 
useless in coming generations that is only what has 
always happened. God grant that by that time 
they shall not have assumed such sanctity as to be 
used to discourage new advances yn science and 
religion. 

In no age or country was it ever more dangerous 
to Christianity to arouse prejudice and ignorance in 
its behalf than now and here. Elsewhere the right 
of leadership has generally been conceded to the 
learned. ‘There has been high respect for specialists 
and scholars. Hence the terrible mass weight of the 
arrogance of ignorance has seldom stood long in the 
way of progress. Even in democratic America af- 
fairs were formerly left to representatives who were 
usually men of light and leading. Now the ten- 
dency is to absolute democracy, with the people 
presuming to settle everything directly. Old sys-- 
tems of checks and balances, the delegation of 


{ 73 ] 


DO. FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY’ FAIRY 


power to leaders, and the impossibility of acting 
quickly upon impulse and passion are all being 
swept away. Direct election of all servants of the 
state, including judges, the recall of any not re- 
flecting the mood of the people, the initiative and 
referendum, all this is bound to be very terrible 
where prejudice and ignorance control. It is by 
no means uncommon-for any man specially trained 
for some responsible position to be defeated because 
of distrust of theorists and specialists by the masses. 
In many districts candidates for the legislature and 
congress easily beat educated opponents by claim- 
ing to represent the average ignorance of their con- 
stituents. 

Fundamentalism has allied itself with this spirit; 
perhaps has been created by it. Where it has se- 
cured the passage of laws against teaching anything 
it conceives to be detrimental to Christianity, and 
where it has tried, but failed, to pass such laws, 
it has done so by popular appeal to prejudice and 
ignorance. Where it controls teaching through 
pressure put upon governors and state school 
boards, it is by the same means. ‘The voice of the 
people is assumed to be the voice of God. ‘The 
majority speaks, and the rights of minorities dis- 
appear. What was right yesterday is wrong to-day 
because the people have voted it so. What is true 
to-day is false to-morrow because the legislature 
has passed a bill, effective after midnight, declaring 
it not a fact. What experts say or specialists testi- 
fy is of no avail; they are biased and unbelieving. 
The people know what is true, just as they once 


{74 } 


RESTRICTING CHRISTIANITY 


knew the earth was flat and stationary because they 
did not fall off; that the sun moved across the 
heavens because they saw it go; that they got 
malaria, not from a germ, insect-carried, but from 
breathing night air. 

Ultimately the force conservative religion has 
called to its aid will destroy it. Meantime it will 
alienate from itself all those who will to know the 
truth. If reached by liberal preaching and teach- 
ing such may be saved to Christianity. Otherwise 
the fundamentalists will carry it unanimously that 
religion and ignorance are one and inseparable, now 
and forever. 


{ 75] 


CHAP TERT 


No FAIR SUBSTITUTING A HEATHEN GOD 
FOR THE CHRISTIAN GOD 


For heathens to present their conception of their 
gods is fair enough. For anybody to set forth the 
conceptions of God held by the ancient Hindus, or 
Greeks, or Hebrews, is open to no objection. To 
trace to their origins any elements entering into 
the Christian God is above criticism. But to put 
any or all of these concepts in the place of the dis- 
tinctively Christian view of God as taught by 
Christ, or properly deduced from his teaching, is 
foul play. 

Such things are done in the name of Christianity. 
They have been crystallized in the creeds of the 
past. “They lie back of laws and prohibitions of 
the present. “They are loudly proclaimed by sen- 
sational evangelists and professional converters. 
They have to be supported by fundamentalists and 
other advocates of a dead level of perfection in an 
infallible Bible. Whenever such things are done 
it is likely to be with the attempt to deny that those 
who do not acquiesce have a right to be considered 
Christian. Examples of such unchristian views of 
God may be noted under each of the heads set down 
in this paragraph. 

Take the fundamentalists first. “They are com- 

[ 76 ] 


HEATHEN GOD FOR CHRISTIAN 


mitted to defending as a necessary part of Christian- 
ity everything that their infallible Bible attributes 
to God. To them it is impossible to hold that Old 
Testament ideas of God were often imperfect and 
erroneous. ‘They can admit that anything about 
God not revealed in the Old Testament could be 
reserved for the New, that the old ideas were in- 
complete. But they cannot admit that concep- 
tions of God in a barbarous age were false as set 
forth in Scripture. What the Old Testament said 
God was or did, and the motives and reasons he 
had for doing things, the fundamentalist must ac- 
cept as absolutely true. When God was angry with 
Israel and prompted David to make a census of the 
people so he would have an excuse for wreaking 
his wrath upon the king, he did so by destroying 
seventy thousand of the people. “The account in 
Samuel says God tempted David to do it. That 
was before Jewish theology had invented the 
Devil. As Isaiah put it, God did everything, cre- 
ated darkness as well as light, and did evil as well 
as good. When Chronicles was written centuries 
later, the inspired writer had no such notion of a 
verbally inerrant Bible as the fundamentalists 
have. Hence he boldly changed the record and said 
Satan did the tempting. But in either case and in 
many others showing God cruel and vindictive, we 
have a picture of God so alien to Christ’s teaching 
that it is unfair to hold it as a part of Christian 
faith. 

Take evangelical evangelism. It holds essen- 
tially with fundamentalism. But it stresses certain 


{77 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


conceptions of God that are useful in getting 
people into the big tent and making them hit the 
sawdust trail in large numbers. God is therefore 
represented as bound by a terrible law to send every- 
body who does not accept the evangelists’ idea of 
the death of Jesus to an eternal hell. The idea 
is that God was bound by another terrible law mak- 
ing it impossible for him to forgive and save anyone 
until Jesus was sacrificed to remove from everybody 
the guilt of original sin brought about by Adam’s 
fall. The simple and intelligible language of the 
New ‘Testament which uses such figures and illus- 
trations as lie at the basis of this preaching is 
violently distorted. It is held to be literally true 
that God demanded the slaughter of his innocent 
Son before he would for a moment consider letting 
anyone escape everlasting damnation. 

That is a good heathen idea of God, but it is not 
a Hebrew concept, still less a Christian one. It is 
insistently declared to be the teaching of all Old 
Testament sacrifice. If that were true there is no 
good reason for counting it a permanent part of 
religion. All the most spiritual Old Testament 
teachers, such as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, 
indignantly branded all sacrifices as harmful to 
religion, hurtful to men, and hateful to God. Re- 
specting the very time that the Law of Moses rep- 
resents God as circumstantially instituting all the 
sacrifices, the prophets declare he never instituted 
or desired them. As a thing existing in spite of 
God, because of the hardness of human hearts, they 
are reckoned with in the New Testament in trying 


{ 78 ] 


HEATHEN GOD FOR CHRISTIAN 


to impress the value of Christ upon men. But take 
them at the full face value put upon them by un- 
spiritual priests, sacrifices are not represented, even 
in the Law, as the basis of God’s forgiveness. They 
attended to various ceremonial and inadvertent 
lapses. Often they were to set right what would 
seem to us mere breaches of etiquette, such as eating 
pie with a knife. 

How then does the Old Testament represent God 
as dealing with an actual sinner who presump- 
tuously transgressed the eternal principles of right 
and truth? Necessarily the divine holiness reacted 
against such a one. Between God and him there 
could be no peace or fellowship. Nothing was said 
of Adam’s fall as entailing damnation upon men. 
Where in Scripture is anything ever said of it save 
in a couple of Pauline illustrations that Calvinism 
has put upon all fours? But of the man’s own 
actual sin it is represented that confession and peni- 
tence brought God’s pardon. It was as simple as 
for a father to forgive his erring child, with never 
a hint of pardon having to wait until another child, 
guiltless of any offense, could be sacrificed as a vol- 
untary atonement. And the teaching of Christ is 
to the same effect. When the Prodigal returned the 
father did not have to slay either the fatted calf or 
the elder son before he could forgive and reinstate 
the penitent boy. Great faith, though in a heathen 
Roman, won the blessing of God; or in a Phoeni- 
cian, or in a dying, penitent robber. 

To all who know the constraining power of love 
in its extreme offering, to all won by that love to 


{79 } 


~ DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


lives of devotion to God, to all heartened for self- 
denial by the conviction that in Christ’s cross we 
find assurance that God himself is pledged to self- 
sacrifice until he shall see of the travail of his soul 
in the redemption of his children and be satisfied— 
to all such there is understanding of the ransom for 
many in the death of Jesus. “The Christian God has 
no favor for sale. As of old, he requires nought 
but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly 
with him. ‘The God of current evangelism is a 
heathen survival. Whoever else has preached him, 
Christ never did. When God is enslaved by any 
inexorable law which eternally damns everybody 
who does not believe that he had to slay his Son 
before he could forgive the penitent, then there will 
be no God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ 
left in the universe. 

Next take the God of those who are making 
people religious by act of legislature. The ends 
they have in view may be very laudable. To know 
the Bible, to honor Christ, to reverence God, to 
forsake evil and cleave to good are things for lack 
of which the world is in sore straits. But when did 
it become possible to legislate such things into 
people? Or when did the Christian God ever at- 
tempt to force men into his service, or authorize 
others to try it? When tried, has it not proved a 
wretched failure at best, and a bloodthirsty, tor- 
turing horror at worst? Was it fair to do to the 
Jews what the church dared do in the name of 
Christ for centuries? Was it Christian, what the 


{ 80 } 


HEATHEN GOD FOR CHRISTIAN 


Inquisition did to heretics? Anyway, what did it 
accomplish? 

Nowadays when a teacher is punished for vio- 
lating laws forbidding the teaching of science, or 
commanding the daily reading of the Bible, our 
modern protectors of God cry out in amazement 
when charged with persecuting. They say all is 
now being done according to regular legal process 
before properly constituted courts to uphold 
statutes duly enacted by state legislatures. Do they 
fancy that persecutions in the past were without 
due process of law? The slaughter of the early 
Christians for not worshipping the emperor was 
done under the Roman law, by sentence of its 
courts, and at the hands of its legal officers. Back 
of all the fires of Smithfield in the reign of Bloody 
Mary there were the regularly enacted laws of the 
British parliament. It has always been so when 
majorities have dared speak for God. They do 
not have to proceed without law, though along 
with it the general spirit of intolerance commonly 
raises up some mob or secret organization to add 
lawless to lawful violence. “The God who is afraid 
to permit academic freedom and liberty of speech 
is not the Christian God, nor is the God of coercion 
and persecution. Religion forced or hypocritically 
pretended may satisfy some jungle divinity, but it 
is meaningless to Christianity, 

Finally, take a creedal caricature of the Christian 
God. One would fain believe that no denomina- 
tion to-day would stand for the extreme Calvinistic 
doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation. 


{ 81] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


Of course it is in the Westminster Confession of 
Faith, and that is still subscribed to by churches. 
But the day of taking such adherence to out-worn 
creeds seriously has passed for most people. 
Nevertheless a book is at hand, written by a learned 
seminary professor, and both delivered as lectures 
and printed by denominational authority, wherein 
the God of the Westminster divines stands forth. 
The book is recent enough to bid for popularity by 
a title claiming that the reader may apply within 
to learn just what God thinks of evolution. In the 
main, it treats of total depravity and predestina- 
tion. All men richly deserve to be everlastingly 
damned because they were present in the person 
of Adam when the first sin was committed. Un- 
told millions of them who were elected to be born 
where they could not possibly hear the gopsel have 
been thus deservedly damned. But a great multi- 
tude were predestined to eternal life by improving 
their opportunity to believe the Calvinistic doctrine 
of the relation of Christ’s sacrifice to salvation. 
After the rigors of the old theology which had its 
many infants, not a span long, in hell, it is a sign 
of real evolution to find here the belief that all 
infants dying in infancy are saved. But the head 
and front of this offending against a good Christian 
God is in the reason given for letting anybody be 
saved at all. “They are saved not because they 
merit it; Adam spoiled all that in the year 4004 
B. C., the memorable year when God devoted a 
week to the creation of the entire universe. “They 
are not saved in order that they might be holy and 


{ 82 J 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


happy; that is only incidental. They are saved 
for the purpose of displaying to principalities and 
powers God’s glory. What could be more Christ- 
like than such a God? For what higher purpose 
could God have created man, damning most, but 
saving many, than for the selfishness of getting 
glory from principalities and powers? 

Is it asking too much when it is requested that 
such conceptions of God be not charged to Jesus 
Christ? If so, may it not at least be asked that those 
holding different conceptions be not branded as 
anti-christian? We do not ask that any legislature 
shall outlaw these heathen gods of our neighbors, 
nor prevent their writing and talking about them. 
We do not even say that those holding such views 
of God may not be estimable Christian people, for 
life abounds in strange contradictions. But we 
must insist that under the rules of the game we 
think it unfair to mix gods in such wise. 


[ 83 ] 


CHAPTER XI 
WHAT If IT IS No FAIR? 


Such violations of fair play as have been noticed 
might be greatly multiplied without exhausting 
the list. But in reflecting upon the matter, it seems 
as though religious people are inclined to dismiss 
the charge of foul play with a shrug and a sneer. 
What of it?) We shall play as we please. In the 
end, however, it is the church that is debarred from 
the game by unfairness. 

The church has always lost in the battle with 
science. Look through any record of the conflict 
between theology and science and it is made clear 
that science has always won because theology has 
always been wrong. ‘The classical case is the oppo- 
sition to the Copernican system of Astronomy. It 
was made dramatic by Galileo. Everybody knows 
about it. Nobody denies either the truth of what 
Galileo stood for or the error of what the church 
upheld. Yet where will you find that the church 
ever confessed its sins in that matter, or ever asked 
the pardon of science? A shocking wrong was 
done to individuals, and a grievious sin was com- 
mitted against truth. Yet the institution that is 
supposed to be the pillar and ground of the truth, 
and that exists to condemn sin and call sinners to 
confession and repentance, has never cleared its 


[ 84 } 


WHAT IF IT IS NO FAIR? 


record. Never mind about that, it says in effect, 
we are too busy resisting the science of to-day to 
say anything about the conflicts of yesterday. 
The story has been repeated in the history of 
other sciences. Geology and Biology have been 
fought and have won. Just now the battle is about 
organic evolution. | It offers a fine field. “The Bible 
is set against it. Wrathful prejudice is stirred up 
by telling people that their mothers are insulted by 
teaching they had monkey blood in their veins. 
The hypothesis is highly technical and easily de- 
rided by ignorance. Such proofs as it has are not 
demonstrable, but only probable. But if bigotry 
wins the battle it will be the first time. Skirmishes 
may be won. Scientists are constantly abandoning 
positions which are found untenable. ‘They are 
always modifying their theories to harmonize with 
facts. “Theology never drives science out, it only 
shouts when science moves from a weak to a 
stronger position. Theology is always resisting the 
modification of its theories, which seldom have any 
facts to embarrass them. If it has to abandon its 
positions, it does so behind smoke screens, and then 
loudly declares it was always just where found after 
the smoke blows away. Can that commend the 
church to the fair-minded? | 
Unfairness about the Bible is worse than oppo- 
sition to science. [he scientists take care of their 
field, but only religionists can take care of the Bible. 
Falsehoods against science may arise from ignorance 
and that an ignorance excusable if not accompanied 
by pretentions to knowledge. But the Bible is the 


[85 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 





specialty of religious people, and what they say of 
it ought to be dependable. Certainly those who ~ 
proclaim themselves its true interpreters and de- 
fenders against all enemies in and out of the church 
ought to tell the truth about the Bible. “That they 
never tell the truth when their theories require false 
supports is notorious. 

Here, for instancé, is the official organ of the 
Bible League of North America, just from the press, 
a month before the date it carries. What are the 
latest fundamentalist assertions respecting the 
Bible? That it can be confldently asserted that not 
a single statement of Scripture has ever been proved 
erroneous—not a single demonstrated fact of 
natural science contradicts any statement of the 
Bible. If that language has any meaning, it clearly 
proclaims the learned editor who wrote it incapable 
of telling the truth. Does not the Bible state that 
the sun stood still at the command of Joshua. Is 
it not a demonstrated fact of natural science that 
the sun always stands still relative to the earth? 
Therefore the Bible contradicts science, and the 
editor knows that he was not telling the truth, no 
matter how much dust he may throw in the air 
about the language of Scripture being accommo- 
dated to the understanding of the people of Joshua's 
day. Do not the remains of the civilizations of the 
Nile and Tigris valleys antedate the time of Noah’s 
flood, and the creation of Adam? Hence the Bible 
is proved erroneous upon those facts of Archeology. 
Is not the statement of Daniel that Babylon was 
conquered by Darius the Mede false in the face of 


{ 86} 


WHAT IF IT IS NO FAIR 


the correct statement in Isaiah that Cyrus the Per- 
sian was the conqueror? Does not Daniel also un- 
equivocally state that Belshazzar was the last king 
of Babylon? Whereas history shows he was never 
king, and Nabuniad was the last Babylonian king. 
Is it not demonstrable that the name of the Baby- 
lonian conqueror of Judah is commonly mispelled 
in the Bible? What chance have the Bible, truth, 
the church at the hands of religionists who will not 
play fair? 

It looks almost as though the church has devoted 
itself to special pleading for so long that it has 
lost the power to face facts and reach honest con- 
clusions. Hopelessly split up for centuries into 
sects that cannot agree as to the validity of what 
their rivals teach as the very truth of God, how 
can they recognize the proof of anything they do 
not want to be true? ‘Take the difference between 
Calvinism and Arminianism as still maintained by 
Presbyterians and Methodists. Both may be 
wrong, but both cannot be right. Yet they go on 
century after century, millions of them; demonstra- 
ting their rival theories from the same Bible. Or 
take the Lord’s Supper. “To the Catholic it is the 
veritable flesh and blood of Christ; to the Lutheran 
it is bread and wine accompanied by the flesh and 
blood of Christ; to the Reformed churches it is the 
simple memorial of Christ’s broken body and shed 
blood. All appeal to the same plain Scriptures. 
Each is sure the other is wrong, and in the past 
many a one was tortured and martyred for not 
agreeing with the persecutors. Or take a plain and 


[87 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


simple matter like baptism. Leave out all theologt- 
cal questions as to its function in regeneration, or 
its origin, or its proper subject. Consider the 
single matter of the mode or manner in which it 
was performed in New Testament times—the dif- 
ference between immersionist and nonimmersionist. 
It is a question of fact demonstrable by an appeal 
to philology and history. But look at the course 
of the contention, the vast literature, the record of 
bitter strife. If anything in Scripture and history 
can be proved, that point can. Yet so marvelously 
gifted is the church in resisting the proof of any- 
thing it wants to reject, that centuries of strife have 
led nowhere. In almost any Bible-loving commun- 
ity in America families can be divided, business 
disrupted, and anti-evolution relegated to the rear 
if an able and determined evangelist will proclaim 
his view of baptism. 

Why go on? It is the same with the matter of 
what the Bible means by bishops and elders, with 
apostolic succession, with the proper date of Easter, 
with Sabbath versus Sunday, with Adventism, and 
much more. All Christians who are one hundred 
percent. loyal to their denominations are trained 
to defend their peculiar tenets, however absurd or 
false, and to disbelieve the opposing teaching of 
other sects, however rational and true. “They have 
never learned to play fair. Small wonder, then, 
that they can see neither the truths of science nor 
the errors of the Bible. “They have been rendered 
morally color-blind. They are wilfully ignorant. 
‘They can know a thing and not know it at the 


[ 88 } 


WHAT IF IT IS NO FAIR? 


same time. They can follow science up to the 
point where it meets a prejudice and then balk. 
Some of them even admit the evolutionary hy- 
pothesis as applicable to all forms of plant and 
animal life, but deny it with respect to man. Hav- 
ing been bred and trained to combine against all 
unacceptable facts, when they combine with other 
sects in a kind of working union it has to be 
against something. ‘The truth or falsity of what 
they fight is as it happens. Their methods of fight- 
ing are with reference to success, not with reference 
to fairness or unfairness. 

Among the perils to the church from its present 
warfare against science and modern thought is the 
peril of further sectarian division. Fundamental- 
ists are increasingly insistent that all liberalists and 
modernists shall withdraw or be driven out of every 
established denomination. Failing that, all con- 
servatives and fundamentalists are told that they 
must withdraw from their unchristian brothers 
and begin the propagation of pure religion anew. 

The prospect is appalling to any one loving the 
church and Christianity. There is the ancient 
schism between the Greek and the Roman Catholic 
Churches. ‘Then there is the great gulf fixed be- 
tween Catholic and Protestant. In America alone 
there are literally hundreds of different Protestant 
sects. And now it is seriously proposed by the op- 
ponents of liberalism that these hundreds be multi- 
plied by two. For that is what it would come to. 
But few denominations are entirely made up of 
either liberals or conservatives. Exceptions would 


[89] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


be the Unitarians on the one side, and the Holy 
Rollers on the other. When the other two or three 
hundred sects drive out the progressives, or with- 
draw the conservatives, let no one suppose they 
will all be united in two great denominations. 
That might be a happy solution of the problem, 
but it can never be. 

Whatever chance there might be of the liberals | 
reducing the numbers of original parties amongst 
them, no possibility of any reduction of conserva- 
tive sects is thinkable. Sectional differences be- 
tween northern and southern bodies will remain. 
Racial divisions will abide. Historical and doctrin- 
al loyalties will be intensified. Bigotry and con- 
tention will flourish anew. No sooner will all the 
Simon-pure groups of believers settle down to the 
enjoyment of their self-righteousness than new oc- 
casions of dispute will emerge. Having released 
anew upon the world all the concentrated venom of 
sectarianism, it will react upon every one hundred 
percent. pure church and rend it afresh. Having 
taken up the sword of strife the churches will perish 
by the sword. 

We are told that such Ate as of a true 
Gideon’s band from the faint-hearted hosts now 
constituting liberalism, will be the prelude to the 
Christian conquest of the earth. But we have heard 
overmuch already of a war to end war, and are dis- 
illusioned. We have read the history of Wee Frees, 
and Hard Shells, and bitter enders of all sorts, and 
know that human stubborness and self-assurance 
are poor preludes to spiritual victories. Let no man 


[90] 


WHAT IF IT IS NO FAIR? 


deceive himself or others. The wrath of man does 
not work to the glory of God. 

It is tragic to hear earnest, and sometimes learned 
men advocating such sectarianism by the same old 
sophistries which have always been used when 
rending asunder the body of Christ. They declare 
that the points at issue are absolutely fundamental; 
that it is no question of the unessentials of opinion, 
but of the indispensables of faith. Liberalism is 
not allowed the standing of a heresy; it is not 
even unorthodox Christianity. Modernism and 
Christianity are declared to be two diametrically op- 
posed religions. [hey are said to be as diverse as 
Greek paganism and Christianity. Indeed, any- 
thing but fundamentalism is denied the status of 
religion on any terms. Modernism is said to be 
materialistic and antisupernatural. Yet every mat- 
ter which has led to separatism in the past has been 
thus exalted by sectarians. Otherwise, why would 
serious, religious men ever have endured the strife 
and obloquy and loss of separating themselves from 
long established bodies? We look back upon these 
schisms now and realize how comic they would 
have been had they not been so serious. A sense 
of humor might save from the repetition of such 
folly if the love of Christ cannot constrain from it. 

Yet when the matter is sifted, what is found at 
issue? Metaphysical subtleties about the attributes 
of God, the person of Christ, the nature of sin, and 
the process of salvation. Or demonstrably false 
theories of the plenary infallibility of Scripture, not 
as a guide in religion, but respecting every inconse- 


{91 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


quential item set down in the Bible in the course of 
a thousand years of ancient history. If the Bible 
were rejected as no indispensable guide to Christian 
life; if God and Christ were denied; if sin were 
encouraged and salvation spurned; then a serious 
difference would exist. But all that has developed 
to date is a matter of how men are to try to state 
in modern phraseology ancient mysteries of faith 
over which human minds have struggled for ages. 
If new content is placed in any word of Scripture 
or creed, dishonesty is charged. If new words and 
declarations of faith are uttered, it is announced 
that the offenders must get out and start a new sect, 
or remain dumb while they see the churches of 
their fathers and of their love disintegrating help- 
lessly before the problems of the age. If it was 
wrong to split the church into fragments over mat- 
ters of polity, and government, and baptism, and 
musical instruments and missionary societies, and 
buttons and bonnets, it is madness to resplit all the 
fragments now over incomprehensible profundities 
of doctrine. 

If the peril of hopeless division is merely threat- 
ening the church, the calamity of reliance upon 
material power has already fallen upon it. Asa dis- 
tinguished liberal English divine has recently pointed 
out the lost radiance of the Christian religion is due 
to forsaking the spirit for the letter, the inward 
principle for the outward law. While the sin is 
possibly not confined to conservatives in religion, it 
most logically pertains to their position. Their 
view of the Bible is legalistic and literalistic to the 


{ 92 } 





WHAT IF IT IS NO FAIR? 


last degree. So also is their interpretation of the 
ancient creeds, of the atonement, and justification. 
A religion of authority and external control by a 
book of laws is more likely to lead to dependence 
upon material power than isa religion of the spirit. 
At any rate, there can be no question that funda- 
mentalists are the Christians most responsible for 
surrendering to the law in America what properly 
belongs to religion. A cultured Princeton theo- 
logian may renounce such a course, and promote 
fundamentalism by argument and metaphysics. 
But a Texas ‘‘Cyclone”’ is said to prefer sawed-off 
shotguns and acts of legislature. Certainly the 
latter has the more dramatic appeal, and the larger 
following. 

Among the many and increasing benefits of pro- 
hibition, there cannot be overlooked the part its 
advocacy has played in entangling the American 
- church in law and politics. “The organization that 
defeated the liquor traffic was essentially preacher 
originated and preacher manned. Its victory 
taught the preachers how to play politics and get 
quick results by legislation. Slow educational proc- 
esses, and the task of winning a nation to sobriety 
through spiritual ideals and constraints were largely 
abandoned for law and force. “Through centuries 
of preaching and pleading the church failed to 
cripple the drink business by converting saloon 
keepers and their customers to temperance. “Then 
the defeat of morality and religion turned the 
preachers into politicians to force Caesar to do what 
they had not enabled Christ to do, Following the 


[93 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


enactment of prohibition in states and nation 
they became officers of the law, detectives, law and 
order committees, and informers. Such, among the 
denominations of the South and West where funda- 
mentalism abounds, the preachers are quite largely 
to-day. 

Having closed the saloons by law, ministers now 
appeal to men to be sober, not in the name of 
Christ, but in the name of law and constitution. 
Where men fail to keep the law, the preacher is 
rather more likely to hunt them with guns and de- 
liver them to jail than to pray with them and for 
them. ‘The end sought being good, it is wellnigh 
impossible to convince ministers that the means em- 
ployed might be better. A vexed problem, truly, 
to determine how far a preacher, as a voting citi- 
zen, is justified in entering politics to aid righteous 
causes. But about one matter there should be no 
question; to abandon persuasion for coercion is to 
forsake the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. 

From his political experience the preacher 
learned that a well-organized minority controlling 
even a small bloc of votes in a legislature can do 
wonders by trading votes with other groups. 
Members of legislature interested in some practical 
bill will vote for almost any moral legislation if 
the moral bloc will put the practical measure 
through. Or the result is the same when candidates 
know the moral forces hold a balance of power. 
Hence the unholy alliances in recent years be- 
tween temperance people and those politically dry 
but personally wet. And hence the more recent 


[94 } 


WHAT IF IT IS NO FAIR? 


lining up of votes to outlaw religious schools main- 
tained by Catholics, to compel the reading of the 
Bible in public schools, to ban the teaching of evo- 
lution. 

When these laws are passed, no matter by what 
political jobbery, and no matter in violation of 
what principles, the strength of pulpit and religious 
press immediately gets behind the enforcement, in- 
sisting that it is the duty of every citizen to obey 
every law. ‘Than which nothing more deadly and 
dangerous to religion could possibly be promul- 
gated. Deadly, because the task of the church is 
spiritual, and forsaking spiritual means for law 
and force is surrendering to the enemy. Dangerous, 
because the most glorious eras in religion history are 
those wherein the faithful laid down their lives 
rather than obey the laws. It is essentially to say, 
we have no king but Caesar, when confronted by a 
king and kingdom not of this world. It is to re- 
verse the apostolic declaration about obeying God 
rather than man. 

When the church is betrayed by its own un- 
spiritual lack of vision into dependence upon the 
state, the American principle of freedom of church 
and state is tottering to its fall. When its ancient 
spiritual power to remake a world has given place 
to truckling cowardice hiding behind wrangling 
legislatures, its glory has departed. When bondage 
to the letter and the law are its fundamentals, the 
church has already been slain and must await a 
resurrection before it can know the spirit and the 


[ 95 ] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


life. Failure to play the game fairly under the rules 
has brought no inconsiderable part of American 
Christianity to that sad plight. 


[96 } 


CHAPTER XII 
WHAT MIGHT RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


If what has been written has inflicted any 
wounds upon religious people or the church, may 
it be remembered that faithful are the wounds of a 
friend. If it has seemed destructive it should be 
recalled that destruction goes before all construc- 
tion. Certainly the writer can lay claim to sincere 
interest in religion and the church. His personal 
relation to both has lasted for over forty years, 
and, thanks to a very early beginning, he has been 
a preacher for thirty-nine years. During nearly 
all that time he has been in intimate contact with 
students and their problems, first as a student him- 
self, and then as college preacher and Bible teacher. 
The task has been performed mainly in one of the 
greatest of the mid-western universities, in the 
greatest of the universities of India, and the greatest 
of the southern universities. But in occasional lec- 
tures and constant preaching it has also been per- 
formed in many colleges and churches throughout 
America and elsewhere. Let it then be granted 
that, if a life of devotion to the service of church 
and Bible count for anything, the writer should be 
numbered among the friends of church and Bible. 

For the past twenty odd years it has chanced 
that the weeks have been devoted to teaching the 


[97] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


Bible to students, and the Sundays to preaching, 
mainly to country people in small rural churches. 
During all that time it has been as easy to convey 
the gospel to farmer folk in harmony with modern 
thought as to university students. Seeking to be 
all things to all men has required adaptation of 
language to the comprehension of each group, but 
no compromise with either. “Thence has arisen the 
conclusion that modern thought and criticism may 
greatly modify the faith of both preacher and con- 
gregation, both teacher and class, but need not des- 
troy the faith of either. Unless somebody comes 
along to create alarm and accuse of heresy, such 
things are not thought of, nor can any difference 
be seen in the fruits of a ministry as between the 
fundamentalist and the modernist, whether they 
be two different preachers or one preacher of two 
different periods of his life. 

But in contact with students it is soon demon- 
strated that what destroys faith and discredits the 
Bible is teaching and preaching in harmony with 
what has been denounced as No Fair in the pre- 
ceding chapters. Of course not in every case, but 
in the vast majority of cases adherence to such 
things is impossible in the free air of a university. 
Christianity must be shown to harmonize with and 
live by the side of modern science and sound 
ethics, or it cannot live at all in the souls of the 
best elements of university communities. It would 
be as easy to preserve belief in Santa Claus in grown 
men and women as to preserve intact in college 
students faith in the things fundamentalism is in- 


[98 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


sisting upon. ‘The passing of faith in both Santa 
and fundamentalism may be accompanied by 
shock and resentment. It may even leave many 
where any faith at all will be spurned. But such 
destructive results of growth and education wrong 
no one. 

If the church really wants to reproduce in our 
colleges and universities the conditions prevailing 
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- 
turies, it has only to go on with its anti-evolution, 
pro-infallibility fundamentalism. Again we may 
search the universities, and even church colleges in 
vain to find a single student willing to be known 
as a Christian. What is saving the situation now 
is frankness and fairness in meeting student prob- 
lems. Call it liberalism, or modernism, or what 
you please, it is the only phase of Christianity that 
can speak a language intelligible and appealing to 
the modern educated man and woman. God 
knows it is hard enough to reach them even with 
that in a world whose boosters, and Babbitts, and 
prosperity, and mammon, have driven so many 
mad for greed and gain. Think of the pitiful 
plight of the church when the terms upon which 
it seeks ministers leave its seminaries empty of 
college-bred youth, and send it clamoring around 
the doors of Bible training schools for ministerial 
recruits. . 

Fair play will let the church recognize that no 
conspiracy was formed to steal all the professor- 
ships, and prominent pulpits and executive posi- 
tions in missionary societies for modernists. Noth- 


[ 99 ] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


ing else can live in centers of learning and in the 
souls of great men fitted for leadership. As well 
expect all the great captains of industry and com- 
merce to be the aged business men of the past 
century, or the proprietors of petty village stores, 
as to look for venerable conservatism or complacent 
mediocrity in the high places of education and 
religion. If organizations for putting the little 
men in the big places succeed there will soon be 
no big places. “The leaders should lead. 

Fair play will enable all Christians to look not 
every man on his own things, but also on the 
things of others. It is preposterous to brand all 
modern thinkers as unchristian and pagan. It can 
be done only by first defining Christianity in nar- 
row and wooden. terms, and then showing that 
modernists do not subscribe to such definitions. 
The Christian conception of God is thus. ‘The 
true doctrine of the person of Christ is this. Atone- 
ment and salvation are that. Modernists do not 
understand, these terms in this way. Therefore 
they are not Christians, and will destroy Christi- 
-anity if they are not stopped from defining it in 
other terms. 

What could be simpler? And what could be 
more like the most unchristian sectarianism of the 
past? ‘Thus judged by the conservative church- 
men of their day Paul, and Wiclyffe, and Luther, 
and Calvin, and Tyndale, and Knox, and Wesley 
and Bunyan, and Roger Williams, and Campbell, 
and Channing, were all not Christians. If new 
conceptions and practices and doctrines are not to 


{ 100 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


be tolerated there is simply no way for Christian- 
ity to live. If we are to say this man does not 
believe in predestination, that one denies freedom 
of the will, the other one rejects transubstantiation, 
a fourth will not be immersed, a fifth will not 
subscribe to the Nicene creed, a sixth will not 
pray to the Trinity——we are back in the wilder- 
ness of sectarians where no one is admitted to be 
a Christian except our little circle. 

How time and familiarity cure such narrowness 
if we are just a little fair. “The writer belongs 
to a religious body that began by making a sharp 
distinction between the Old and New Testaments, 
the Law and the gospel. It would not subscribe 
to any of the creeds, not even the simple Apostles’ 
Creed. It chose to call Bible things by Bible terms, 
and therefore would not mention the Trinity, nor 
admit to its hymn books praises to God in three 
persons. Hence it was long set down as Unitarian 
and scorned and shunned by the orthodox. Yet 
it recognized the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be- 
lieved in the divinity of Christ, and accepted all 
the established doctrines of the creeds. Without 
change in any of those respects, it is now recog- 
nized in the company of the orthodox, and the 
vast majority of its preachers and members are 
no doubt soundly fundamentalist. If the gentle- 
man who writes about Christianity and Liberalism 
as two distinct and diametrically opposed religions 
had been alive a century ago, he would unques- 
tionably have had his church Christian and mine 
unchristian, by many infallible proofs. If he 


{ 101 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


could be alive a century hence he would undoubt- 
edly regard present day liberalism as Christian, and 
be proving something else, then new, as nonchrist- 
ian. Why not be of the spirit which can antici- 
pate the verdict of time? Why not admit the 
other man may be telling the truth when he says 
that his conception of Christianity is, in other 
terms, what every man’s Christianity has always 
essentially been? 

Fair play will convince the fundamentalist that 
the modernist is not opposed to the supernatural, 
or not against what lies obscured in that word. 
Here and there may be found an occasional man 
who maintains some sort of contact with organ- 
ized Christianity with no recognition of God. But 
that any considerable number of people pay any 
attention to religion after reducing the universe 
to a materialistic and mechanistic basis is unthink- 
able. Amid many differences between conservative 
and liberal Christians there surely must remain the 
common ground of faith in God. Yet the fun- 
damentalist literature, from ignorant sermons to 
learned books, persists in demonstrating to the sat- 
isfaction of its writers that modernists have elim- 
inated the supernatural. 

Evidently we have another case of confused 
terms. As defined by a leading fundamentalist 
theological professor, nobody has ever truly be- 
lieved in the supernatural. He reduces it largely 
to a matter of miracle—that is, an event caused by 
God without the use of means of any kind. And 
in order to have miracles, or departures from the 


[ 102 J 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


laws of nature, he holds that there must be recog- 
nized the existence of a real order of nature from 
which God occasionally departs. Yet at no time 
at which fundamentalism believes any miracle ever 
occurred did there exist an established belief in 
fixed laws of nature. “There were certain ordinary 
events in the common course of things to the an- 
cients. But anything could happen to anybody 
or anything at any time in a fashion to make im- 
possible belief in fixed laws of nature. Hence we 
have the strange circumstance that in the days when 
men were recording miracles there was no recogni- 
tion of natural law, and in the days when there 
is recognition of natural law there is no occurrence 
of miracle. If then both belief in natural law and 
events apart from it are necessary to demonstrate 
the supernatural, it cannot be demonstrated. 
Probably no modernist believes in the reality of 
any miracle as fundamentalism understands the 
term. But liberal Christians aplenty believe that 
every event which ever was, or ever shall be, had 
or shall have but one cause, namely, God. Not 
as deists, nor as pantheists do they conceive of God, 
as perversely represented by fundamentalism. God 
is immanent in all things, but he also transcends 
all things. In trying to explain the miracles at- 
tributed to Jesus upon some rational basis, they 
are only endeavoring to show the way God did 
those things. In attempting to probe the mysteries 
of the origin of life, the religious man is but seek- 
ing to think God’s thoughts after him. If creation 
is represented as evolution from forces resident in 


{ 103 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


matter, religion adds that those forces were put 
there by God. 

Just because the liberal Christian finds the proof 
of theological miracles unconvincing he should not 
be declared void of belief in spiritual forces. “The 
wonders of the existing universe, and the thought 
of its development from the beginning are, as Hux- 
ley truly put it, miracles that make those of theol- 
ogy mere child’s play. His acceptance of the 
proved facts and reasonable hypotheses of scientists 
does not compel the Christian man to follow re- 
ligio-scientific theologizing into agnosticism or 
atheism. 

It is folly to maintain that rejection of the old 
two-storied idea of the universe drives God out of . 
his world. God was upstairs in heaven, and man, 
downstairs on earth. From time to time God came 
down, as when he broke up the building of the 
tower of Babel to keep men from invading his 
upstairs. [hen things were different for a while 
from what they were when God was upstairs. A 
rod would change to a snake, or an ax would 
come up from the bottom of a pool and float on 
the surface, or a man would live three days and 
write good poetry in the belly of a fish, or several 
lads would live in comfort in a burning, fiery fur- 
nace, or a great quantity of water would change to 
strong wine, or a handkerchief sent from one man 
to others would drive devils out of them. The 
acceptance or rejection of all of which is no evi- 
dence that a man believes or disbelieves in a God 
spiritually active in nature and in man. 


{ 104 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


If the supernatural disappears by rubbing out 
the line between nature.and God, religion has lost 
nothing at the hands of liberalists. Evolution does 
not ptoceed anywhere that mind touches nature 
without profound influence from mind. Where 
man is, vast areas of nature are conquered by the 
power of his intelligence. And to say that the 
liberalist ceases to be a Christian because he aban- 
dons many antique notions, and is unconvinced in 
the presence of much that may be true but is not 
proved, is to alienate friends in the struggle with 
materialism. The word supernatural may be 
abandoned or modified, but should be allowed to 
mark no division between those who believe in a 
God who worked hitherto and now works in ways 
beyond human comprehension, but not without 
convincing proof of spiritual power. — 

Fair play will end reliance upon coercion and 
force for the accomplishment of spiritual ends. 
The most hideous chapters in religious history have 
been written in blood by the light of the fires of 
persecution. Christianity has been no exception to 
other religions in that respect. No Christian de- 
nomination to-day has the right to claim that it 
has shed no blood but its own on account of its 
faith. “That is true of practically all modern sects 
which arose after power to shed the blood of others 
was taken away by the state, or had withered in 
the tolerance of recent years. But no sect has the 
right to repudiate the past history of Christianity 
as a whole. All the blood of all the martyrs shed 
in the past is upon the church to-day. Humble 


[ 105 J 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


confession of sins, and works meet for repentance 
are the duty of all Christians with regard to re- 
ligious persecution. 

So far from performing that duty the funda- 
mentalists have entered upon a new course of per- 
secution. It has cost numerous faithful teachers 
and preachers their positions and salaries. “That 
often means the blood of souls, if not of bodies. 
Where capable and devoted men have long served 
churches and colleges at such financial sacrifices as 
that work entails, throwing them out of employ- 
ment late in life, for no fault save honesty to truth 
as they see it, may well mean putting them and 
their dependents to death by slow torture. If it 
is replied that it is better for them to suffer phys- 
ically than to leave them where their teaching may 
cause others to suffer eternally, the argument is 
startlingly like that used to justify the burning of 
heretics. When did churchmen ever fail to claim 
that their savagery was for the saving of souls? 

For the present, however, we may dismiss such 
cases. We may also leave out of account actual 
physical violence done by unknown masked men 
to others whose faith is offensive. We have not 
the proof of the religious standing of the criminals, 
nor of the exact reasons for the violence done. 
Of one thing we may nevertheless rest assured— 
that if minorities, of Jews, or Catholics, or others, 
are to be oppressed and terrorized by majorities 
in the name of patriotism and religion, the country 
will be driven to religious and civil war. Nothing 
more dreadful has ever overtaken any country. 


[ 106 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


Those bringing it about are religious persecutors 
of the worst type. ‘Their churches can never escape 
the blood guiltiness of it by claiming it is done by 
the state. 

What concerns us now is the result of funda- 
mentalist appeals to legislatures and courts to work 
their will upon other people. ‘There they are not 
dealing with their co-religionists through ecclesias- 
tical bans and dismissals. “hey are laying hold 
upon the powers of the state to force their will 
upon others. But for the intervention of the 
United States Supreme Court, they would have 
taken from the religious schools of a whole great 
state the children whose parents were paying to 
have them taught there. Had the attempt suc- 
ceeded in Oregon it would have spread to other 
states. If there is a majority of people in the na- 
tion bent upon such bigotry and persecution they 
will tear down the Supreme Court and so rebuild 
it that such laws will be allowed. | 

Even in Virginia, where Jefferson labored for 
complete separation of church and state, and where 
the most powerful religious body has always 
boasted of its adherence to the principle of re- 
ligious liberty, a bill to force the reading of the 
Bible every day in every public schoolroom was 
narrowly defeated in the latest legislature. At this 
very time conventions of that same powerful de- 
nomination, and other religious bodies, are passing 
resolutions asking the next legislature to pass the 
Bible-reading bill. It is also being announced in 
the press that numerous secret societies are drafting 


{ 107 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


both that bill and one on anti-evolution. What 
must Jefferson be thinking of Virginia citizens? 
And Roger Williams of the members of his house- 
hold of faith? Happily the State Association of 
that church has just rebuked the lesser Associations 
advocating the passage of the Bible-reading bill by 
declaring unanimously against such religious tyr- 
anny. 

Unless there is a speedy revival of fair play in 
this matter the church will suffer such shame as 
never before has overtaken her. By deliberate ac- 
tion of a whole people, when before did the church 
cut down such a tree of liberty as our father’s 
planted here for the healing of the nations? When, 
with such light and learning, did the church ever 
before ban free scientific research and teaching? “To 
force the Bible upon children, or subject them to 
derision for being kept away while the Bible is 
read in the schools supported by public taxation, 
is to disgrace the Bible. “To forbid, by law, the 
teaching in schools and universities of everything 
a majority of voters may decide does not agree 
with the Bible, is to make a laughing-stock of the 
church. 

Once the church starts such a program it will 
not stop short of ruin. “Tennessee will justify an 
anti-evolution law by claiming she does not teach 
the Bible in public schools, and therefore ought not 
to teach what opposes the Bible. But Virginia will 
both put the Bible in and put evolution out if 
the present plans of its zealots are carried on to 
victory in its next legislature. All such states are 


{ 108 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


arguing that they are not restricting teachers or 
banning teaching because everybody is left free to 
teach anything outside of state controlled institu- 
tions. But education having been entrusted to the 
state and nation, in many regions there are few 
or no free universities. Everywhere colleges are 
the creatures of the state as they derive their charters 
from states. [hey are also all partly supported 
by states through remission of all taxes on their 
real estate and endowments. Oregon has already, 
by a majority vote of the state, attempted to de- 
stroy all schools not tax supported. New York’s 
Lusk Laws allow no teaching on any subject what- 
ever by any individual or school without a license 
from the University of the State of New York. 
Nebraska, and other states have laws forbidding 
any public or private school from teaching any 
foreign language below the high-school grades. 
Other states are in for similar legislation. 

Does anybody think that religious freedom can 
live in a land ruled by majorities when religion 
and patriotism have united to foster bigotry and 
fanaticism? The prejudice and ignorance that can 
compel the congress of this vast empire, and the 
legislatures of great sovereign commonwealths to 
pass such laws as those just described can do any- 
thing oppressive. Our most sacred liberties are 
not being violated by a single madman like Nero, 
who could easily be restrained or slain. We are 
in a land where a whole people have to go crazy 
to perpetrate such oppressions. 

There is little comfort in the thought that the 


{ 109 ] 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


Supreme Court reverses the people and courts of 
Oregon in such matters. With the Ku Klux Klan 
solemnly resolving to drive out paganism, and vast 
religious organizations determined to put God in 
the constitution and their notion of the Bible in 
all the schools, politicians are a vain hope. If 
any courts have the temerity to resist, the voice of 
the people, which is the voice of God, will speak. 
Politicians and legislatures and congress will re- 
move that obstacle to the oppression of minorities 
by constitutional amendment, direct election of all 
judges, and the recall. “The beginning of all this 
is here. Continued agitation by the pulpit and 
religious press is all that is needed to speed fanatic- 
ism on to the terrible end. 

Let us return to sanity before our prisons are 
filled with scholars who will neither cease to teach 
at the command of legislatures nor pay fines im- 
posed by courts for their disregard of law. Let 
us turn back before the road now entered upon 
leads to a religious war. Come and let us reason 
together, was the call of God through an ancient 
prophet. Let us preach, teach, write, debate, talk 
in behalf of anything we believe. If you know 
no better, rant, and storm, and curse against every- 
thing you do not believe. But leave the truth 
free to win by spiritual means. Claiming God, 
and Christ, and the Bible, and nature, and reason, 
and time, and eternity all on your side, trust any 
of them or all of them to win the victory. Religion 
by coercion destroys itself. 

Fair play will remove the charge and taint of 


[110 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


dishonesty from Christianity. How far existing 
foul play has caused the actual taint of dishonesty 
to extend, God only knows. It may exist because 
of intellectual cowardice on the part of those who 
are special pleaders for God and the Bible—those 
who hold all their knowledge aloof from their 
religion, knowing the facts but resisting the con- 
clusions. It may blight the teachers and preachers 
who dare not tell the truth or champion reform 
and freedom because they fear to lose the only 
employment for which they are trained. It may 
damn tradesmen and politicians who dread the ef- 
fect of popular disfavor on dollars and votes. It 
may keep the multitude orthodox from dread of 
eternal damnation. “Think what it would mean 
for all these to be free, checked by no threats and 
penalties from showing exactly what they believe 
and what they are. “The best could then honestly 
go to work to make the worst better. Religion 
could be cleared of a large part of its sham and 
hypocrisy. 

As. for charges of dishonesty, they are most 
vehemently made against those who are working 
to liberate Christianity from this taint. To the 
fundamentalist the lie of all lies is for men to put 
new meanings into old terms; to say they believe 
the Bible is inspired, Christ divine, and that he 
died to save us from our sins, but to understand 
the terms in senses not acceptable to conservatism. 
So with atonement, vicarious sacrifice, redemption, 
and other words. For saying that they believe the 
facts that were intended to be conveyed by the 


[111 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


stories of the virgin birth, bodily resurrection and 
personal second advent of Christ, liberalists are 
branded as hypocrits. Further, the right of any- 
one to change his views after having vowed at ordi- 
nation to teach according to the Nicene Creed, the 
Westminster Confession, or some other authorita- 
tive document, is sternly denied. 

The writer, having been free-born, untrammeled 
by any ordination vow not to outgrow a creed or 
somebody's interpretation of Scripture, has no per- 
sonal experience with the moral problems of con- 
servatives turning liberalists. But they must be 
similar to the difficulties confronted by a Luther, 
or a Wesley, and not unlike those met by Paul and 
by Jesus himself. Jesus remained within the 
Jewish church and accepted its Scriptures. But 
he criticized and disregarded many of the rules of 
his church. He set aside such parts of Scripture 
as conflicted with his moral and spiritual sense. 
He modified and put new meanings into many 
biblical passages. Paul, indeed, broke with the 
church of his fathers, but claimed he and not they 
had the true idea of Jewish faith and Bible. In 
his new religious connection he found himself at 
bitter variance with the original Jewish Christians. 
They refused to recognize his apostleship, repu- 
diated his interpretation of the fundamentals of 
salvation, and charged that he made the gospel 
way of life easy for the sake of gain and popular- 
ity. All of which, as reflected particularly in 
Galatians, reads surprisingly like what fundamen- 
talists are now saying of modernists. Forasmuch 


{ 112] 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


as they were the original Christians and could 
claim that Christ and all the pillar apostles had 
been as they were, they had a vastly stronger case 
against Paul than the conservatives have against 
liberals. But Paul did not get out and leave Chris- 
tianity to them. 

Luther and Wesley desired to work within the 
church of their fathers, and Wesley actually did so 
to the day of his death. Why should they volun- 
tarily have withdrawn and left the church of their 
love to those who were ruining it? Upon what 
constraint must the liberals do so to-day? As well 
might England have expected the Americans of 1776 
to leave their homes and country because they were 
colonists bound to the British king. Reformation 
proceeds from within as long as possible. Revolu- 
tion retains as much as it can of old holdings and 
advantages. 

As for putting new meanings into old terms, 
that constantly happens with the words of any 
living language. ‘The terms of theology have had 
no unvarying meaning to every age, nor to all 
men in any period. A modern physicist is not to 
be denied the use of “‘atom’’ because he has a 
different conception of it from that of the chemist 
of a generation ago, or the Greek philosopher of 
twenty-five hundred years ago. ‘‘Redemption”’ 
may still be employed, although men no longer 
think it means a price paid by Christ to the Devil 
to let men go. 

Granted, that when a liberal accepts ideas lying 
back of such stories as the virgin birth, he should 


{ 113 } 


DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


make it clear that the stories stand in the Bible 
as literal records of facts. Yet the intensest con- 
servatism will not deny that the idea of God made 
manifest in humanity is the important thing in 
the story. An account of a virgin birth was a 
natural and congenial way for first century folk to 
set forth any belief they had in the greatness 
or divinity of any one. Modernism has a right to 
say it believes in the resurrection when it means 
it believes in the conscious, personal immortality of 
Jesus. If asked to define its use of the word it 
should certainly make plain its departure from the 
scriptural accounts of the physical resurrection of 
Jesus. But in all such cases it is wrong to charge 
liberals with deceit. “They share with funda- 
mentalists the assurance that Christ died once but 
is alive forevermore. Say what you please of their 
departure from the letter of the accounts in the 
Gospels. Urge the proofs of your position, and 
the difficulties of understanding the faith of the 
early church on any other theory. But do not 
brand as liars the men unconvinced by your proofs, 
and unconcerned as to what became of the physical 
body after the death of Jesus, although cherishing 
the hope that because he lives they shall live also. 

When it comes down to the probabilities as to 
who is lying because of the strife between funda- 
mentalist and liberal, the chances are immensely 
on the side of the former. “The man in any church 
who is suspected as a liberal almost always faces a 
hostile majority. In most communities he stands 
to lose socially and financially. When he meets 


{ 114 ] 


RESULT FROM BAIR PEAY 


new ideas his impulse is to dodge them. If he 
faces facts he may resist the logical conclusions to 
be drawn from them. Often he fears the effects 
of revolutionary beliefs upon his children or upon 
society. Any position he holds as preacher or pro- 
fessor is jeopardized. 

It is easy to see that for one man who may do 
something equivocal as a known modernist there 
must be thousands who allow inertia, or ease, or 
social standing, or money, or cowardice, to betray 
them. If they are irreligious they have their own 
crowd and are not so likely to compromise. But 
it they associate with religious people and love 
their approval and society, the temptation to let 
well-enough alone and work within the limitations 
orthodoxy imposes, is strong. As long as any 
church is organized against open-minded explora- 
tion of the whole field of truth, it is exposing itself 
to the danger of a dishonest ministry and member- 
ship. While in any college the only way to ad- 
vancement and permanence of position is through 
conformity to some external rule of faith and 
practice, mediocrity and cowardice will prostitute 
learning and betray youth. 

The dead hand of the past has no right to dom- 
inate a living church. The will of founders and 
donors should not be able to stop the growth and 
adaptability of institutions. The letter of creeds 
and confessions ought to be of no avail to hinder 
the spirit. Nothing is more preposterous than the 
common fundamentalist claim that every denom- 
ination has the right to fix fast the terms upon 


{ 115 } 





DO FUNDAMENTALISTS PLAY FAIR? 


which its members shall be received and live. Only | 
if they frankly admit they are no part of the 
church of the living God, but just lodges and 
private associations, have they any such right. 
Churches are not private, voluntary associations. 
They claim to be of God and Christ. People are 
born and reared in them much as they are in the 
state. Only by breaking old ties, surrendering in- 
terests, and faring forth to unknown associations 
can people get out of the churches of their fathers 
and families. If they care to do so, well and good, 
let them depart. So it is in the involuntary asso- 
ciation of the state, where we have rights and priv- 
ileges that we may leave, but from which we should 
not be driven. Neither churches nor states can 
afford to live in the past, balking progress, com- 
pelling uniformity or expelling agitators and lib- 
erals. Loyalty to founders, constitutions, creeds, 
and leaders means trying to keep as true to great 
principles in our day as the fathers did in theirs. 
That means constant change, and adaptation, and 
reinterpretation. 

_ All too few are the people in the world sincerely 
desiring to know and serve God according to the 
teaching of Christ. All of us are beset by the 
mystery of our world, and the difficulty of holding 
fast to any faith in a good God. Such a God as 
Christ revealed, in love and righteousness, in good- 
ness and severity, is worthy of all acceptation. 
But nature and humanity are so savage and brutal 
in many of their manifestations that it is hard to 
believe that their God is also Christ's. For those 


{ 116 } 


RESULT FROM FAIR PLAY 


who have attained to such faith, and are willing 
to back it with life and labor, their duty ought to 
be clear. Not by wrangling over words, not by 
cramming creeds down other people’s throats, not 
by coercion and persecution is that duty to be per- 
formed. But by clean living, by spiritual free- 
dom, by open mindedness we may help. Our dif- 
ferences are nothing, our agreements are all-suf- 
ficient, if only we will play fair. 


{ 117 ] 













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INDEX 


A 


Abuses inevitable, 30, 31 

Adventism, 88 

American Christianity, 96 

Annales Veteris et Novi Testa- 
menti, 17 

Anthropology, 21 

Anti-evolution, 11, 41 

Apostolic succession, 88 

Archaelogy, 86 

Arminianism, 87 

Arrogance of ignorance, 69 

Assumptions, 24 

Astronomy, 13, 14, 21, 84 

Atoms, 113 

Autograph manuscripts, 55 

Autographs, infallible, 51, 55, 
56 


B 


Babel, 15 
Baptism, 88 
pipes 451 57)°65;'66, 108 
ange Gorist, §9 7} 28 
and evolution, 11, 12 
and science, 12, 16 
contradictions in, 54 
divergences in, 54 
infallibility of, 40, 56, 60, 
91 
inspiration of, 60, 65 
King James’ version, 51 
Latin, 62 
No Fair deserting for auto- 
graphs, 51 


Bible, Revised version, 51, 52 
unfairness about, 85 

Bible Institutes, 71 

Bible League of North America, 

86 

Bible-reading, 46, 
in schools, 95 

Biblical chronology, 17, 18 
datesau iyi) Vain Lo 
infallibility, 51, 52 

Biology) 124)21,,.85 

Bishops, 88 

Bigotry, 109 

Birth, virgin, 113 

Brains and religion, 68 


107 


Bunyan, 100 
@ 
Calvin, 100 
Calvinism) 1/9) Sil 8 2b 87 
Campbell, 100 
Catholic and Protestant churches, 
89 


Catholics. 35) 62187 
Channing, 100 
Children and “‘No Fair’, 5 
Christ, 41, 91 
and the Bible, 
Christian, 88, 99 
doctrine, 69 
Christian God, 79 
creedal caricature of, 81 
substitution of heathen 
god for, 76 
scientists, 47 


otal te 


{ 119 } 


INDEX 


Christianity, 45, 49, 68, 72, 
70s) Ie. OS see 
American, 96 
and ignorance, 70 
in bondage, 46 
restriction of, 68 
Christmas, 73 
Chronology, biblical, 17, 18 


Greek, 19 
heathen, 18 
Hebrew, 19 


Samaritan, 19 
Church, “417 62,766,072 
and politics, 48 
and science, 84 
catholic and protestant, 89 
divisions in, 92 
episcopal, 43 
Greek and Roman catho- 
lic, 89 
reformed, 87 
self-betrayed, 95 
services, 69 
state, 46 
Coercion, 105 
Coney, 12 
Confession, 115 
Westminster, 82 
Conservative religion, 75 
Conservatism and Progressiv- 
ism, 72 
Contradictions, 54, 64 
Controversy, religious, 42 
No Fair in, 6 
Copernican astronomy, 84 
Greation,: D1 ,>% 42409265 v2.7. 
82, W103 
date of, 20 
of mand 
Creator, 29 


Creeds; 720976, 115 
Nicene, 73 

Criticism, higher, 38, 54 
lower, 54 


textual, 54, 56 
D 


Damnation, 82 

Darwin, 3:1, 732) 354 

Darwinism, 34 

Hates, sbiblicalt wL/¢ elo 
of creation, 20 


of flood, 20 
David, 66 
Dead hand, 115 
Death, 28 


Democracy, 73 

Devil, the, 66 
Difficulties, 64 

Disciples, the, 43 
Dishonesty, Vl Ele a> 
Divergences in bible, 54 
Divorce, 48, 49 
Doctrine, Christian, 69 
Donors, 115 


i 


Education boards, 46 
Earth, the, 14 
Easter, 73, 88 
Elders, 88 
Election, 81 
Episcopal church, 43 
Erasmus, ¥52Z 
Evangelical evangelism, 77 
idea of God, 77 
Evil, responsibility of religion 
for, 36 
responsibility of 
for, 36 


science 


[ 120 } 


INDEX 


Evil, systems not 
for, 30 
Evolution, 24, 32, 36, 39, 47, 
85, 89, 105 
and biple,* 115.132 
Evolutionists, 26, 32 


Experts, 74 


responsible 


ti 


Fair play, what might result 
from, 97 

Faith, 29 

Family, 66 

Fanaticism, 109 

Firmament, 14, 15 

First cause, 29 

Flood, 13, 14, 24 
date of, 20 

Foreword, 5 

Foul play, 84 

Founders, 115 

Freedom, religious, 109 

Frightfulness, 35 


Fundamentalism, 41, 43, 57, 
74, 98, 99, and see 
Fundamentalists. 


and ignorance, 70 
inconsistencies of, 57 
leaders of, 71 
Southern, 42 


Fundamentalists, 38, 40, 41, 
are. L653) 7.0. 4 FOF 
86, 89, 93, 102, 106, 
POT el 1S AUT 2 Aa, 
115, and see Funda- 
mentalism. 
idea of God, 77 
Fundamentals, the, 38 
G 
Galileo, 15, 84 


Games, No Fair in, 5 


Genesis, 24, 27, 54 
Geology, 13, 21, 85 
German radicalism, 40 
rationalism, 40 
Germany, 39, 40, 41 
God, 29, 91 
christian, 79 
creedal caricature of, 81 
substitution of heathen 
god for, 76 
conception of, 103 
evangelical idea of, 77 
fundamentalist idea of, 77 
heathen, substituted for 
christian God. 76 
old testament, 79 


Gods, 76 

Gospels, the, 64 

Goths, 35 

Greek and Roman _ catholic 


church, 89 
Greek chronology, 19 
Greek manuscripts, 53 
Greek New Testament, 52, 62 
Greek, text, received, 53 
Guesses, 24 


H 


Hard Shells, 90 
HarewelZ 
Hatred, national, 41 
racial, 38 
Heathen chronology, 18 
Heathen god substituted for 
christian God, 76 
Hebrew chronology, 19 
manuscripts, 53 
old testament, 52, 62 
Herakleitus, 26 
Higher criticism, 38, 54 
History, 21,054 


{121 } 


INDEX 


Hoax, restoration, 22 
Holy Rollers, 90 
Huxley, 104 
Hypothesis, 27 


I 


Ignorance, 73, 74, 109 
and Christianity, 70 
and fundamentalism} 70 
and the ministry, 70 
arrogance of, 69 
Ignorant, the, 68 
Immersion, 88 
Immortality, 28 


Inconsistencies, fundamentalist, 
DY, 
Infallibility, biblical, 40, 51, 


PAN ake MCR EP GU | 
Infallible autographs, 51, 55, 

56 
Inhumanity, 34 
Inquisition, the, 81 
Inspiration of bible, 

63, 65 

verbal, 60, 63, 64 

Institutes, Bible, 71 
‘ Intellectuals, 68 


60, 61, 


J 
James’, King, version of Bible, 
a 
Jerusalem, 71 
Jesus, 26, 112 
John, 26, 72 
Jonah, 64 
K 
King James’ version of Bible, 
51 
Knox, 100 


Ku Klux Klan, 110 


t 


Languages, origin of, 25 
Latin bible, 62 
Laws, 45, 49, 50, 54 
bondage of religion to, 47 
Lusk, 109 
sabbath, 46 
Leadership, 100 
Learning, 73 
Legalists, 50 
Legislation and religion, 80 
Legislatures, 49 
Letter and spirit, 92 
Liberalism, 89, 91, 99 
Liberalists, 89, 105 
Liberals, 41, 90, 114 
Life, 24 
Lights, 14 
Liquor traffic, 93 
Logos 25 .hvie 
Lord’s supper, 87 
Lower criticism, 54 
Lusk laws, 109 
Luther, 41, 100; 1127a0 36 
Lutherans, 87 
Lying, 114 


M 


Man, creation of, 1l 
Manuscripts, autograph, 55 
Greek, 53 
Hebrew, 53 
Materialistic science, 38 
Medicine, 16 
Mendelian law, 12 
Messiah, 26 
Methodists, 87 
Militarism, Prussian, 33 
Ministry, the, and ignorance, 
70 
Minorities, 106 


{ 122 ] 





INDEX 


Minorities and votes, 94 
Miracles, 102, 103, 104 


and natural law, 103 


Modern persecution, 81 
Modernism, 91, 99 
Modernists, 89, 100, 102, 112 
Mohammedans, 35, 47 
Monkeys, 85 

Moon, 14 

Mosaic law, 58 

Mustard seed, 12 

Mysteries, 103 


N 


National hatreds, 41 

Natural law and miracle, 103 
Nebraska, 
New Testament, Greek, 52, 62 
New York, 109 

Nietzsche, 33 

Nicene creed, 73 

Noah’s flood, 13, 14, 24 


109 


date of, 20 


North America, Bible league of, 


86 


No Fair, anti-evolution only, 


11 

blaming every evil attend- 
ing a system on its ad- 
vocates, 30 

children and, 5 

denouncing assumptions, 
24 

deserting our bible for 
infallible autographs, 51 

in games, 5 

in religious controversy, 6 

promoting sectionalism and: 
racial hate in the name 
of Christ, 38 

regulations, 5 





No Fair restricting Christianity 
to the ignorant, 68 
_ repudiating Usher, 17 
substituting a heathen god 
for the christian God, 
76 
the Law in the religion 
of the spirit, 45 
verbal inspiration, 60 
what if it is? 84 


O 


Old testament, Hebrew, 52, 62 
Old testament God, 79 
Oregon, 107, 109, 110 
Orthodoxy, 42 


P 


Pacifists, 39 
Pauly 7 20 200 a1? 
Pentateuch, Samaritan, 62 
Persecution, 105, 106 
modern, 81 
Philology, 15 
Philosophical theories, 25 
Philo-Judzus, 26 
Philosophy, 70 
Fiaton20 
Politicians, 49 
Politics and church, 48 
and preachers, 93 
Preachers and politics, 93 
Preaching, 69 
Predestination, 82 
Prejudice, 73, 74, 85, 109 
race, 43 
religious, 41, 43 
Presbyterians, 87 
Progressivism and conserva- 
tism, 72 


[123 } 





INDEX 





Prohibition, 48, 49, 93, 94 

Protestant and catholic church, 
89 

Protestant sects, 89 

Protestantism, 62 

Protestants, 35, 63 

Pro-scientists, 25 

Prussian militarism, 33 

Psychology, 15 .< 


R 


Race prejudice, 43 
Racial hate, 38 
Radicalism, 41 
Rationalism, 41 
Readings, various, 53 
Received Greek text, 53 
Redemption, 113 
Reformation, 61, 70 
Reformed churches, 87 
Religion, 110 
and legislation, 80 
bondage of, to law, 47 
brains and, 68 
conservative, 75 
forced, 81 
of the spirit, 45 
pretended, 81 
responsibility of, for evil, 
36 
Religio-Scientist, 25 
Religious controversy, 6, 42 
freedom, 109 
prejudices, 41, 43 
schools, 46 
wars, 34, 
Reprobation, 81 
Research, scientific, 108 
Restoration hoax, 22 
Restricting christianity to the 
ignorant, 68 


110 


Resurrection, 114 

Revelation, 61 

Revised version of Bible, 51, 52 

Roman and Greek catholic 
churches, 89 

Roman Empire, 69 


Rome, 71 


Sabbath, 88 

Sabbath laws, 46 

Sacrifices, 78 

Salvation, 91 

Samaritan chronology, 19 

Samaritan pentateuch, 62 

Saul of Tarsus, 68 

Savagery, 35 
and soul-saving, 106 

Schisms, 89 

Scholars, 73 

Scholarship, 39 

Schools, bible reading in, 95 
religious, 46 

Science, 54, 64, 67, 85 
and bible, 12, 16 
and church, 84 
materialistic, 38 
responsibility of for evil, 

36 

Science teaching, 46 

Science-theologians, 25 

Scientific research, 108 

Scientists, christian, 47 
proto-, 25 

Scripture, infallibility of, 40, 

56;60n91 

Sectarian division, 89 

Sectarianism, 90 
unchristian, 100 

Sectionalism, 38, 42, 43 

Sects, protestant, 89 


{ 124 } 


INDEX 


Seminaries, theological, 71 
Sheol, 15 
Simplicity, 69 
Sin, 24, 91 
Soul-saving, and savagery, 106 
Southern fundamentalism, 42 
states, 41 
Special pleading, 87 
Specialists, 73, 74 
Spinoza, 26 
Spirit, 50 
and letter, 92 
religion of the, 45 
REALS Lt 
State churches, 46 
Stoics, 26 
Substitution of heathen god for 
christian God, 76 
Sun 4l5 
Sunday, 88 
Supernatural, 102, 105 
Survival of the fittest, 32, 33 
Systems not responsible for 
evils, 30 


si 


Temperance, 48, 94 
Tennessee, 108 
Terminology, 113 
Terrorism, 106 
Texas ‘‘cyclone’’, 93 
Textual criticism, 56 


higher, 54 
lower, 54 
Theists, 32 


Theologians, science-, 25 
Theological seminaries, 71 
Thinkers, 100 


Tradition, 62 
Trinitarians, 52 
Truth, 86 
Tyndale, 100 


U 


Unchristian sectarianism, 100 
Unfairness about bible, 85 
Unitatians,< (5,2, 90,4108 
Universe, 13, 24, 104 
Usher, James, 17 

dates, 18, 19 

No Fair repudiating, 17 


V 


Verbal agreement, 64 
inspiration, 60, 63, 64 


Violence, 106 
Virgin birth, 113 
Virginia, 107, 108 


Votes, minority and, 94 


W 


Wargjou 0 

Worlds ooo 
Wars, religious, 34, 110 
We Frees, 90 
Wesley, 100, 112, 113 
Western states, 41 
Westminster confession, 82 
What if it is No Fair, 84 
Wicklyffe, 100 
Williams, 100 


Z 
Zeno, 26 


[125] 






























































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